Apple might be the Mayor of Dongletown, but the dongles they do make are usually very good.

They stay away from complicated ones like port replicators. I'm convinced nobody can make a stable one of those for USB-C/ThunderBolt.

> I had to use a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter, a Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire 6-pin adapter and then FireWire 6-pin to FireWire 9-pin adapter. I was shocked that it worked so well.

This same setup also works for other FireWire peripherals, like camcorders, for what it's worth.

> a Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire 6-pin adapter

How in blazes does that one actually work?! Is it a PCI FireWire interface chip or does Thunderbolt have a FireWire alternate mode?

FireWire standard mandates implementation of a fully capable controller behind every FireWire port. So it's a FireWire Card (sic) which talks PCI over TB at one end, with a single FW port.

This is why FireWire was always very light on CPU utilization. It always did its work by itself. There was no WinModem magic behind.

A Firewire CDRW was the only way I could reliably record CD's on my 2000's laptop. The USB ones were either 1.1 which barely had enough bandwidth, or the CPU usage went so high...

As a bonus I could daisy chain a 40GB external HD off of it!

I still have a Maxtor USB/FW400 external 1TB drive. It's both handsome and worked wonderfully on a FW port. It also has daisy-chain capability.

It worked so well for so many years.

Please, share a picture of the dongle chain :)

Not OP, but imagine something like this https://postimg.cc/N53tdRDc

(Which was just getting from standard serial port to some weird nonstandard RJ45 thingy for some weird SINIX terminal concentrator with the available technotrash(USB2Serial-> gender changer, etc))

:-)

This gives me hope I will still be able to pull a bunch of digital 8 tape content off a cam with firewire output still. Even if I need to get a mac, it might still work!

Now if someone can come up with a similar solution to get an ultra-wide scsi external HD to usb or whatever, I'll have a few great projects to get into.

For what it's worth, I used to do exactly this with one or two programs on Linux. I think I had the most success with dvgrab. It even can control the Digital8 camera and rewind and whatnot. It should work with any Firewire card that works on Linux as well.

I wonder if you can stick one of those old Firewire to SCSI adapters on the end of that