Using external hard drives with Mac Studio

Thunderbolt is available and an adapter can get from Thunderbolt USB-C to the Thunderbolt connector your storage gear is using.

I wouldn’t bother with anything featuring FireWire, given the age, and the speed of that equipment, and the cost of adapters to get there.

This as compared with the cost of recent or new replacement storage.

If you want to continue to use the Mac mini gear, reconfigure it as Time Machine target, assuming your version of macOS on that Mac mini is new enough to support that feature.

Backup disks you can use with Time Machine - Apple Support

Mac Studio has USB-A connections. See below for the back-side I/O connections. Front-side I/O varies by model.

As for performance, HDDs are somewhere between slow and glacial, and older drives tend toward yet slower, and tend toward capacities well behind current, and tend toward failures as the HDDs age. What do I mean by this performance? Fast HDDs will do 150 to 200 I/O operations per second. Slow SSDs will do 100,000 I/O operations per second. The internal SSDs on recent Macs are just silly-fast, too. You probably don’t have those “fast” 15K RPM HDDs here, either.

HDDs are basically big and cheap and slow storage in this era, and are still useful for archival storage, and for near-line backups, and as backup targets. On a gonzo-fast Mac? Your Mac, your call, obviously.

The sun is the same in a relative way, but these HDDs are older, shorter of breath, and years closer to death.

Get 10 gigabit/second USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 cases for your 2 external disks.

Remove the physical disks from the old case, and put them into the new USB-C cases.

Or maybe get the OWC dual drive dock (I have one of these with two 5.25" rotating disk drivers plugged in).

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/external-drives/owc-drive-dock

As MrHoffman says, the older interfaces are not worth the effort of getting adapters for them.

I agree with the MrHoffman and BobHarris.

It would be far cheaper and more reliable to pull the Hard Drives from the FireWire enclosures and put them in newer enclosures or use a 2 bay dock.

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ME3NH7T00/

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/external-drives/owc-drive-dock

Hi, Suggest to keep Thunderbolt 6T drive. Replace firewire 4T drive with another new Thunderbolt drive.

Firewire drive will need to order conversion adaptor which cost additional money on it. It is better invest on Thunderbolt drive.

Thanks. Hope it helps.

My age is showing. When I said 5.25" I really meant 3.5" disks. Sorry about the misstatement.

Firewire has been dead and buried for a lonnnnggggg time now. The only adapter I ever knew of was the Apple Thunderbolt 1 (mini display port connector)-to-firewire 800.

Firewire to Thunderbolt-2 US$29

ThunderBolt-3 <-> Thunderbolt-2 US$49

for the cost of those, you could buy a really nice new enclosure.