Silly Firewire question

Hey, all. I grabbed an IDE enclosure for a 120GB hard drive I had lying around. The enclosure has USB 2.0 and Firewire 400. The Firewire had the 6-pin connector, which matches the iBook and eMac I have kicking around.

However, I also have my Lenovo T420i with a 4-pin Firewire port on the back. I know one can connect a 4-pin device (like a digital camcorder) to a 4- or 6-pin computer, but can a 6-pin device hook to a 4-pin computer?

Not like I'll ever use it for such a purpose (my T420 has an ultrabay tray, a couple 2.5" IDE and SATA enclosures and a handful of jumpdrives to store stuff on), but I'd just like to know if it's possible.

In other news, I'm wondering why the drive works in both USB and Firewire on the iBook (which is fine) but not on the Lenovo (is it a Windows 7 or x64 thing?). Any thoughts?

 

Hmm, good question. And since firewire is pretty much obsolete, it may be difficulty to get an answer. I'd guess you have to have a device that provides power. If I recall that's what the extra pins are for. Or was that the 9 pin?

Anyway, if it just speed and no power it my just reduce the data rate. Are you figuring something might blow? In that case, don't do it. I've read may horror stories of this happening with 4 to 4 pin.

Yes, drivers and a quirky firewire to begin with. Its never been quite right. After all, you did title it "silly." Is there any wonder it's gone with the Dodo?

 

Really? So why did Apple the chief developer of the technology abandoned it? In fact, very few laptops still have that port even when they're still supporting antiquated VGA?

Firewire had great expectation but it ultimately failed in its application. It never really caught on as a viable data transfer and/or control medium. Even though it was updated many times, in an attempt to keep up with the ever increasing data transfer rate, it was always a day late and a dollar short.

I'm not saying I'm glad it failed, but it inevitably did. At a time virtually every camera that came off the line had firewire, now almost none do.

My old firewire Canon HV camera has always been buggie when it came to connectivity, and if you go online you will find hundreds of others that make the same assertion. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not.

I'm glad it works for you, but you are one of the few and far between cases when it does.

 

The reason why some stuff works badly is because only texas instruments firewire controllers are any good. This is a pretty well known fact.

I don't think Apple is the chief developer I think its sony, IBM also played a big part. BTW the Dell m6600 has 6 pin firewire.

 

An excerpt of the wiki page on firewire. You decide:

The IEEE 1394 interface, developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Apple as FireWire, is a serial bus interface standard for high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer. The 1394 interface is comparable with USB and often those two technologies are considered together, though USB has more market share.[1] Apple first included FireWire in some of its 1999 models, and most Apple computers since the year 2000 have included FireWire ports, though, as of 2012,

Firewire the 800 Mbits/s as opposed to 4 pin 400 Mbits/s

 

Okay, I'll let you have the last word then. Wait...what?

 

So what the wikipedia page is actually saying is that firewire is the apple branding of ieee1394.

Also, we are talking about laptops pretty exclusively here. Whether or not its a dead technology, its certainly rarer than USB, and obviously they're going to put sub par controllers on systems that are mobile and when they have to cut costs etc.

Plenty of people still use it with modern desktops as TI firewire cards are widely available. That isn't to say they aren't with laptops - there are plenty of TI chipset expresscard controllers as well.