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Unfortunately, USB was a juggernaut that wouldn’t be stopped, and Firewire simply died its natural death. Unfortunately, since USB has certain limitations that require one device to be host, and the other to be client (and the OTG mode doesn’t support “Target Mode”-like connections), we no longer have the ability to turn our Macs into an external hard disk.įIrewire was technology invented by Apple. USB2 (and now USB3) have essentially pushed out firewire as the standard hardware connection for fast data transfer. That means you can also reduce the size of the partition if there’s not enough space on the target hard drive. Even Apple has long ago realised that nobody uses firewire on the Macs anymore. This setting is especially useful if you want to replace the source hard disk with a new one (the target drive). DV devices are no longer manufactured everything is now HD, and there are no tape-based new devices anymore, so there is no need for live DV (or HDV) stream via firewire. It was a great option for the time, to flip the role of a firewire-enabled device from a host to a storage device with a simply re-boot.įirewire is long gone from virtually all modern devices. And one of the major advantages of that peer-to-peer architecture was the ability for Apple to make Target Mode possible. Its most significant advantage was its peer-to-peer architecture (vs. It was a superb piece of technology, far superior to USB at the time and, thanks to DV industry’s adoption as a standard for DV stream, it became fairly popular, with quite many computer makers (not called Apple) choosing to put it on their machines (of course, every single Mac had it since G4 models in late 90s). Firewire as an interface has outlived its purpose, and even Apple has now acknowledged that.