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iMac Firewire Ports On Separate Busses?
Tuesday, October 14, 2008 / Hardware
I’m looking for tech info about the FireWire ports on the Aluminum iMac 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo.
I am wondering if the FireWire 400 & FireWire 800 ports are on separate busses. We use these machines for editing and are trying to facilitate ease of use.
We’ve had some issues with the current machines we have. All of which are iMac G5 iSights.
The addition of Firewire 800 was a significant upgrade to the Aluminum iMac line. FW 800 opened up a large number of pro peripherals for use with the iMac, making it an alternative to the Mac Pro for some. Although there is one FireWire 400 and one FireWire 800 port, they do share the same bus. In most cases this is not an issue but it could be if your device requires the entire bus to function properly. That is a situation that would call for a Mac Pro with an extra FireWire card dedicated to your bus-hungry device.
