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I need to connect a FireWire 800 external hard drive to a MacBook Pro early 2013 through its USB 3 port.

I would have done so through the Thunderbolt port but the adaptor for that is too expensive for me at the moment.

I bought a connector on eBay but the FireWire end was female when I want a male end, but I've looked and can't find a single male FireWire end with male USB 3 end.

I badly need to restore my new Mac so your help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

oa-
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jackyboy
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    You're not going to find one because Firewire has been dead since 2013 with Thunderbolt and USB 3 superseding it in 2011 and 2008 respectively. Follow what Robin Whittleton says below, but before you purchase a USB adapter, open the enclosure and check if you have IDE or SATA first; then get the appropriate adapter. – Allan Apr 25 '18 at 12:28

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The Apple Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter is $29, and I don’t think you’ll find much cheaper that that for adapter cables. However if the external Firewire drive is just a normal drive in a Firewire enclosure then you could pull the drive from it and use either a USB3 hard drive case or even a laptop hard drive SATA to USB3 cable. Those cables and enclosures start at around the $10 mark on big ecommerce sites.

Robin Whittleton
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Unfortunately there are no USB to FireWire 800 adapters.

FireWire and USB use different protocols thus an adapter could not transfer any data.

Unless you use some kind of Thunderbolt dock you will need to get your hands on a Thunderbolt to FireWire 800 adapter.

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oa-
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  • Ummm....No. Ethernet and USB are entirely different protocols but there are a ton of adapters for that application. There's no USB to Firewire because 1) FW was a low market demand for it and 2) FW speeds eclipsed USB speeds. Therefore, it wasn't practical to make such an adapter; if you had a FW drive, you already had the adapter. – Allan Apr 25 '18 at 12:17
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I need to connect a FireWire 800 external hard drive to a MacBook Pro early 2013 through its USB 3 port.

Unfortunately I don't think such an adapter exists and if it did exist I would not expect it to be cheap.

It's not that it would be impossible to build such an adapter but the market is small, the engineering work in developing the converter would be non-trivial and there may well be performance issues.

A thunderbolt to firewire adapter OTOH can be made by bolting together existing chips.

I bought a connector on eBay

Be EXTREMELY careful when buying on ebay or from third party sellers on Amazon. Unfortunately there there are a shedload of unscrupulous sellers who will sell cables/adapters with virtually any combination of connectors without telling thier customers that in the vast majority of cases such a cable/adapter is useless or even harmful.

I would have done so through the Thunderbolt port but the adaptor for that is too expensive for me at the moment.

If you want to connect the drive without opening it then it's probablly your only reasonable option.

I badly need to restore my new Mac so your help would be greatly appreciated.

It may be possible to remove the drive from the enclosure and connect it via a different enclosure/adapter. However there are a few enclosures out there that do weird stuff like change the apparent sector size of the drive breaking attempts to read them outside the enclosure.

Peter Green
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