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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2012-01-07, 12:47

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave View Post
Eh... Unless a FW -> Thunderbolt adaptor is really cheap, I'd be a bit surprised. I think I see where you're going with it though, and I'm not sure I disagree.
We'll see. So far, the only things close to that are a $149 Thunderbolt to ExpressCard/34 adapter from Sonnet, on top of which you should theoretically be able to use a $15 FireWire ExpressCard. Not really practical nor affordable.

Or, there's the to-launch-in-spring-2012 Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock with (I believe) no known price.

Either has the upside that they could provide other facilities as well — USB 3.0, eSATA, etc. in the former case, and specifically three USB (2.0, presumably) and one Gigabit Ethernet port. But neither is a compelling out-of-the-box solution just yet.

That said, it's early, and prices will come down. I'm no electrical engineer, but if you can make a $15 ExpressCard-to-FireWire adapter, surely you can do one from Thunderbolt for roughly the same price; internally, they're both PCIe.

Eugene is probably right that direct FireWire ports don't have much of a future in Macs.
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