What can I do with my old Firewire drives?

One option you have, depending on your level of comfort with tools, is to move the drive in the external case to another case which supports, for example, USB. So, if your external drive is internally a 2.5" notebook SATA drive, you could use something like http://eshop.macsale...ing/ES2.5BPU2B/, move the drive over, and still have a working external drive.

If your drive is a different physical size and interface, you would have to find the appropriate external USB case for it.

I hope this helps.

Even though it's only $19 you'd probably want to open up your old drive's enclosure first to make sure it's a SATA connector. The shop Martin mentioned has enclosures for Parallel ATA and Serial ATA drives, but they aren't cross-compatible, typically.

I presume you are talking about FireWire 400, which Apple has dumped in favour of the FireWire 800.

You can buy a connector, cable or a plug which has an 800 connector at one end and a 400 at the other. I think the plug is made by Sonnet (I have one and it works fine). AFAIK they are available in the AppleStore, or try Amazon.

Also, if you have bought a new drive often they have a 400 connector along with 1 or 2 800 connectors and you can daisy chain your old drives to it still using the old 400 cables.

Thus you can still use your old FireWire drives!


Just realised this query was posted in 2009!!!