If you can use or can add a FireWire host port to a system as is possible on a few older Macs, then the PCIe or PCI-X bus can usually support other I/O adapters internally. A couple of Apple adapters in a dongle chain necessary to reach that G-DRIVE would put you up in that same price range.Īs for the existence of any FireWire adapters beyond what's available, FireWire host ports and FireWire device ports are getting scarce.

Last I checked, a couple of terabytes of USB-3 HDD storage was well under US$100. Pragmatically, you'll probably be able to double or triple the storage capacity of that existing G-DRIVE storage box with a replacement USB-3 storage device and for not much more than the cost of the necessary adapters, assuming that you can find or can build what you're looking for.

And FireWire is much slower than is USB-3, so there'll be performance discussions and potentially performance issues there. FireWire to USB might be able to map the host FireWire traffic to specific USB devices, but that'll be a project. Thunderbolt is a way to extend a PCIe bus out of a computer, and there's no way that FireWire can provide anything close to that. I'm not aware of FireWire to Thunderbolt, nor of FireWire to USB. There are Thunderbolt to FireWire adapters around.

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