Not sure why this isn’t news but came across this and a previous rumor on the Mac OS Tahoe (OS 26) beta that firewire support was dropped?
That would be real downer for some of us. I mean, I have some FW DVD media, as well as some FW devices that I use. Luckily I have an intel MacMini (EOL) and even a PowerMac G3 that could be used to get files off. All this procrastination…
I know that it’s been noted in reviews of the developer betas so far, but I don’t think it’s had an official announcement from Apple.
I had a few FireWire drives until about a year ago, when I migrated all of the files worth keeping to new media.
I kept one drive which wouldn’t spin up. I’ll give it one last try at some point, and then it’s off to the recycler.
Apple gradually has been dropping support for FireWire for awhile. For example, support for FireWire audio devices was dropped in Ventura.
But yeah, it’s a bit of a bummer.
It’s been widely covered by virtually all the Mac oriented rumor sites. My hardware doesn’t allow me to test Tahoe, but if I was I wouldn’t be able to confirm or deny due to NDA. It’s always possible that Apple could add it back before product release, but I would judge that to be low probability.
Will break the best scanner I’ve ever owned. Guess I just won’t update. Not in the mood to send Tim any more money, now that we’ve seen where he sends his.
And I have once and for all been cured of beta-testing for Apple.
I don’t believe that any of the remaining Intel Macs that support Tahoe have FireWire ports (certainly the Apple Silicon models don’t). It would not surprise me if that’s the reason for the removal of FireWire support.
I think the last Macs with FireWire ports were 2012 models, though you could buy Thunderbolt-FireWire adapters from Apple for a few more years.
I have some older OWC “quad-port” drives where some of the ports are FireWire 400/800. I used to connect them via Thunderbolt to FireWire adapters in a chain: mac > TB3 > TB2 > FW800 > drive.
Since the drive’s USB port is slow, I switched to using USB to eSATA adapter cables.
That leaves one Firewire drive that only had a FW400 port. The drive was small enough that I could make a disk image of its contents.
Excellent point. People still have useful FW devices and thanks to Apple’s FW-TB adapters those users could still use these devices even on a modern Mac, built-in FW ports or not.
Except via Apple’s (no longer sold) Thunderbolt-Firewire adapter and a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter.
I used this when migrating a 2011 Mac mini (which was backed up to FireWire hard drives) to a 2018 mini.
I once had an Imacon 848 film scanner, and later a Hasselblad X1, both of which used FW400. I ended up getting them to work with a FW400>FW800 adapter, a FW800>Thunderbolt dongle, and a Thunderbolt>Thunderbolt 3 dongle all daisy-chained together. It was a wonderful scanner, but very expensive as a paperweight, which is all it will be shortly.
I’m glad I sold them - the X1 as soon as I heard Hasselblad had discontinued them with no public announcement until remaining new stock had been sold. I can still run my Nikon LS5000ED using the same daisy chain.
Please be patient as a less tech-savvy individual is asking this question: If FireWire support is eliminated, does that mean one could no longer connect a FW device by using a female-FW800-to-male-Thunderbolt2 adapter/dongle plugged into a female-Thunderbolt2-to-male-Thunderbolt3 adapter/dongle?
I still have an older LaCie “Rugged” hard drive with some old files archived on it, and it would be useful to know whether I would no longer be able to access them except by using an older version of MacOS.
That’s correct. To access the files on your old FireWire drive, you would need to use an older version of macOS.
If you upgrade your Mac to Tahoe, you may be able to continue using your FireWire drive by installing a virtual machine with an older version of macOS for when you need access.
That said, your FireWire drive has to be getting old by now. If the files are important to you, I recommend moving them to a different type of storage, whether a local drive or in the cloud.
I say there’s no need to be apologetic because one of the main purposes of TidBiTS Talk is helping people to troubleshoot and to learn.
My recommendation for the contents of your LaCie drive is to copy them to a new HD or SSD soon, if the files are irreplaceable or highly valuable to you. It is impossible to predict when a file could be corrupted or a drive will fail. But the probability of something going wrong greatly increases as storage media ages.
Yes, if all they have is a FireWire interface. But check to see if the drive might also have a USB interface. A quick web search for LaCie rugged drives seems to indicate that they also have USB 2.0 ports. You should still be able to use the USB interface, but it will be slower than the FireWire interface.
I did notice, however (from a product brochure) that the USB port appears to be using a USB Mini-B connector, which is not very common these days. If you don’t have the USB cable it came with, you might need to buy an A to mini-B or C to mini-B cable.
A few things I’m not clear on: Is Firewire actually missing from the current betas? Apple hasn’t actually announced it’s being dropped? Where in the communication stream does the Firewire support need to be?
Currently my scanner is connected to a Sonnet Echo 15 dock via a Firewire_400-to-Firewire_800 cable. In System Information, nothing is shown connected to the Firewire bus. In fact, I can find nowhere in System Information that shows the scanner is attached. It almost seems the Firewire translation is being done at the Echo 15, so possibly this would still work with the macOS 26?
It is odd, in that, I have a memory that System Information used to show the entire tree down to the scanner?
Thanks.
Is the scanner powered-on when you look? If the device is asleep or otherwise waiting for you to turn it on, it may not appear on any bus.
If you can’t see it even when it’s powered on and functioning normally, then I don’t know what to suggest.
FireWire is missing from current betas. No mention of it one way or the other appears in the Developer release notes, so I suppose there is theoretically the chance that it could return, but IIRC, FireWire support has been deprecated for awhile, with support for audio FireWire devices dropped in Ventura.
I don’t know if it will be possible to use FireWire via a pre-Tahoe virtual machine on a Tahoe host, but I suspect the answer will be “no”. If the host doesn’t supply the driver, I doubt the VM will.
Yes, and functioning normally, but not visible to System Information.
The question I am trying to get at: The scan data is transmitted to the Echo 15 dock as Firewire, but goes over Thunderbolt to the Mac Studio. So does the Mac Studio “see” it as Firewire or Thunderbolt data? If the latter, it would seem that I won’t have a problem with macOS 26?
Thanks, all.
Ah, interesting. I just skimmed over that bit. That’s a nice piece of gear. I suggest contacting support@sonnettech.com with your question.