Is Firewire working in macOS 12.7.1?

Sorry for jumping in here, it's been a while. Could you be kind and confirm you were able to run MacOS 12.7.0 on your system with Firewire 800 ports? I assume you were running it with a patch or boot-loader so not official if the machine has 800 ports and running MacOS 12.7 because that is exactly what I intend to do.

Officially the Firewire support was up to Catalina 15.7, but that Firewire support was for any Firewire function. All I need is as you describe the external drive support so that the Firewire drives mount. The machine has no USB3 or Thunderbolt so Firewire is the only option for this.

Thanks.

eBay. LaCie made a few portable Thunderbolt 2 hard drives that you can unscrew and mount via SATA the drives. Be careful, as not all of the drives have Thunderbolt 2. They all have Orange rubber cases that can be pulled off, and all only support 2.5" SATA drives.

LaCie also briefly made a 3.5" SATA Thunderbolt 2 D2 drive case. Those are a pain in the neck to take part, but if successful you can add your 3.5" SATA drives.

I've noticed that the thunderbolt-firewire adapter does not support booting of a hard drive through the adapter. Although it may show the drive. You are better off getting a thunderbolt/SATA adapter that supports thunderbolt 2.

I agree it is very hard to find them anymore. Your best bet is eBay.

This is what's problematic about any equipment between 2011-2015, your fastest speed can be had through USB 3.0 as opposed to Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt 2 is faster than USB 3, but not USB-C and thunderbolt 3/4.

I believe the last Mac that Apple sold with Firewire 800 ports was in 2012… and expecting Apple to provide legacy firewire device support in the operating system for eleven years afterward may be over optimistic since they have already dropped support for HFS formatted drives. I migrated my Firewire drive content to USB storage years ago.

As we are fellow users and the Apple product teams do not participate here, we have no radar as to when they will drop older functionality in the operating system. It doesn't have to happen with the release of an upgrade, it could happen in a point update as Apple has demonstrated in the past.

ogihal wrote:

FYI I still have working Macs with the FireWire ports and use the drive to transfer large amounts of data

And for how long and by what contingency plan do you have in place when the hardware eventually fails?

The Thunderbolt/Firewire adapter is not a power conduit for Firewire devices expected bus power.