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From: D.M. Procida on 20 Jul 2010 18:09
Have any MacBook Pros had FireWire 400 ports?

Daniele
From: Bruce Horrocks on 20 Jul 2010 19:27
On 20/07/2010 23:09, D.M. Procida wrote:
> Have any MacBook Pros had FireWire 400 ports?

For �3.14, all of them...
<http://elagostore.com/elago-FireWire-400-to-800-Adapter/M/B002TF0ZDQ.htm>

--
Bruce Horrocks
Surrey
England
(bruce at scorecrow dot com)
From: David Empson on 20 Jul 2010 20:03
D.M. Procida <real-not-anti-spam-address(a)apple-juice.co.uk> wrote:

> Have any MacBook Pros had FireWire 400 ports?

The original 15" MacBook Pro (early 2006) had Firewire 400, no Firewire
800. FW800 was added on the late 2006 series (Core 2 Duo).

The 17" MacBook Pro (mid 2006) started with both FW400 and FW800.

15" and 17" models continued to have both FW400 and FW800 as long as
they had the original body design.

The Unibody models (late 2008 15", early 2009 17") dropped the FW400
port, leaving a single FW800 port.

The 13" models (from mid 2009) only ever had FW800.

The MacBook started with FW400 but lost Firewire completely when it went
to the Unibody design (aluminium in late 2008, polycarbonate in late
2009).

The MacBook Air never had Firewire.


Now that I have the technical details out of the way...

Having the Firewire 400 port doesn't make a big difference, except in
the case where you need to plug in two Firewire devices neither of which
has a daisy chain Firewire connection. (A Firewire hub solves that
problem.)

The FW400 port may be convenient if you have FW400 cables, but you can
connect any FW400 device to a FW800 port with the correct cable or an
adapter, and you can daisy chain FW400 and FW800 devices on a single
bus.

There is no performance advantage to having two built-in Firewire ports.
For models which have both FW400 and FW800 (or multiple ports of either
type), they are located on the same Firewire bus, and active
communication with devices connected to any port will limit available
bandwidth for every other port (to a greater degree if the device or
cable involved is FW400).

With modern Macs that only have a single FW800 port, you can maximise
performance by connecting multiple Firewire devices in a daisy chain
with FW800 devices closest to the computer, and FW400 devices at the end
of the chain. The bus must be shared between all devices, but that is no
worse than having them plugged into separate built-in Firewire ports on
earlier models.

If you connect them the other way around (FW400 devices first), the
FW800 devices at the end of the chain will be limited to FW400 speeds
all of the time.

To improve performance further you would need Firewire ports on separate
buses. For the 17" MacBook Pro or older 15" models, that can be achieved
with a Firewire card in the ExpressCard slot.

--
David Empson
dempson(a)actrix.gen.nz
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