What is Firewire? What does it do? How do you get it to work on the MacPro…something I must purchase perhaps?

Firewire is a file transfer protocol. You have Firewire ports on the Mac Pro. Most use them for external drives because Firewire is faster than USB.

All you need is an external Firewire device like a storage drive in an enclosure that supports Firewire, preferably FW800. Then you need the appropriate cable to run between the external drive enclosure and a Firewire port on the computer. Your user guide will show where the ports are located. You have two in the front and four in the rear. They are a mix of FW400 and FW800 ports.

Hi F,

It's a way to connect to peripherals outside your computer (HDs, camcorders, etc.)

Which MBP do you have? Older ones have it built in, newer ones you can get a ThunderBolt to FireWire adapter.

Firewire is a serial connector technology that Apple incorporated in its 1999 and later machines that can be adapted to Thunderbolt, Express/34, and PCMCIA. It can't be adapted to USB. Many hard drives have Parallel ATA to Firewire and Serial ATA to Firewire adapters. Firewire in its 4 pin configuration was popular on Sony devices such as Camcorders in the iLink connector format. Apple started with the 6 pin variety that has its own power. In 2003 it started including Firewire 800 in the 9 pin format and shifted to all Firewire 800 until Thunderbolt became standard. A few MacBook, iMac, iBook, and Powerbook models didn't have it at all.

Mac Pro is a desktop computer from Apple. MacBook Pro is a notebook computer. Not knowing your computer's age, doesn't help us determine how to adapt it. Go to your System Profiler and look for Mac Pro x,y or MacBook Pro x,y and tell us which you see, and what x,y values you see.