New iMac today. Ordered a thunderbolt to FireWire 800 cable to connect my two LaCie d2 Quadra HDs to the new iMac. Except the new iMac is thunderbolt 3.

An hour phone call to Apple to try to get the adaptor exchanged. An hour on the phone, two customer service people and a “Genius”. All they could offer was a refund on the adaptor cable. Apple don’t make an adaptor to connect two Apple proprietary products together.

Any tech heads in to offer any advice except to send it back and buy a PC.

I was expecting a fairly seemless transition from a Time Machine backup to the new iMac. That’s not going to happen until the mythical cable is manufactured.

Do your quadra drives have usb3?

Seems you will need a TB3 to TB2 adapter then use a TB2 to FW800 adapter for it to work.

What spec iMac did you go for?

Thunderbolt 3 dock with Firewire 800…

https://www.owcdigital.com/products/thunderbolt-3-dock

Not cheap though.

I use 2 apple dongles, USB-C to thunderbolt and then thunderbolt to FW800 with my old drives
I use the same USB-C to thunderbolt dongle and older thunderbolt cables for my bigger LaCie D2 and 2Big drives.
The dongle would not work with a display port cable (same fitting as thunderbolt 1/2) to a DVI monitor though but is fine with hard drives.

somouk – Member
Seems you will need a TB3 to TB2 adapter then use a TB2 to FW800 adapter for it to work.

What spec iMac did you go for?

The user reviews on the Mac forums of using the above “solution” is patchy at best, especially with music recording software.

I went for the 21.5″ iMac with the Retina display.

The LaCie drives are eSata / FireWire 400 / 800 on the older one and eSata / FireWire 800 / USB3. I’ve got them linked together with FireWire 800 and they were then connected to my old iMac via FireWire 800.

Is the transfer rate on USB3 comparable to FireWire?

I would think that you’d hit the disk read or write limiting speed before the interface, even with a bodge. Why not just take the whole computer back for a refund and buy something else?

But both of the drives are Mac formatted.

I’ll let you tell my wife that all of our precious photo and video memories of our two darling children are lost to computer incompatibility.

Good luck with that. I’ll try to find your testicles and put them on ice after she cuts them off with rusty barbed wire.

http://www.kanex.com/thunderbolt-esata

somouk is correct. Sauce

Simon_g

That’s the same as the thunderbolt to FireWire adaptor that Apple have available. The iMac has thunderbolt 3.

👿

eSATA to USB3 adaptor will see you right. Amazon do them at a reasonable price.

precious photo and video memories

A word to the wise, either get that lot backed up to a decent cloud service or build a freenas box with ZFS, probably both…

Storing backups of valued photos on just a couple of basic external disks will guarantee upset at some point. Bitrot will catch you out eventually even if a failed disk doesn’t.

A word to the wise, either get that lot backed up to a decent cloud service or build a freenas box with ZFS, probably both…

Storing backups of valued photos on just a couple of basic external disks will guarantee upset at some point. Bitrot will catch you out eventually even if a failed disk doesn’t.

😀

bitrot and next generation filesystems

bitrot and next generation filesystems

Good read!