I have several external hard drives that use FireWire 800 ports. In the past, I connected them to a Mac using a ThunderBolt 3 to ThunderBolt 2 adaptor and a ThunderBolt 2 to Firewire 800 adaptor. Now that I bought a new M5 MacBook Pro, the drives aren't connecting. The light on the drive lights up, but the drive does not appear, even in Disk Utility. Is this supposed to work?
MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 26.2
Short answer: no.
FireWire 800 drives are no longer supported on modern Apple-silicon Macs, even if the adapter chain still powers them on. What you’re seeing—drive light comes on but nothing appears in Disk Utility—is exactly what happens when macOS no longer loads the FireWire drivers. Starting with recent macOS releases on Apple silicon, Apple effectively dropped FireWire support at the system level. The Thunderbolt adapters still pass power, but there’s no software layer left to talk to the drive.
Your best options now are practical workarounds: connect those drives to an older Intel Mac that still supports FireWire and copy the data over, move the bare drives into modern USB-C/Thunderbolt enclosures, or use a legacy Mac as a one-time “bridge machine” for migration. There’s no reliable FireWire-to-USB adapter solution, since FireWire needs active drivers—not just a passive cable.
Short answer: no.
FireWire 800 drives are no longer supported on modern Apple-silicon Macs, even if the adapter chain still powers them on. What you’re seeing—drive light comes on but nothing appears in Disk Utility—is exactly what happens when macOS no longer loads the FireWire drivers. Starting with recent macOS releases on Apple silicon, Apple effectively dropped FireWire support at the system level. The Thunderbolt adapters still pass power, but there’s no software layer left to talk to the drive.
Your best options now are practical workarounds: connect those drives to an older Intel Mac that still supports FireWire and copy the data over, move the bare drives into modern USB-C/Thunderbolt enclosures, or use a legacy Mac as a one-time “bridge machine” for migration. There’s no reliable FireWire-to-USB adapter solution, since FireWire needs active drivers—not just a passive cable.
Thanks! I found a workaround: I had forgotten that these drives have another kind of plug, a weird flat kind of USB that I think is called micro-B. I found a USB A to micro-B cable, and a USB C to A adapter, and that lets the drive work.
You're welcome! I'm glad you got it worked out.
Can a FireWire 800 hard drive work with an M5 Mac?
