Two firewire 400 ports on my iMac

What can I use these ports for besides external hard drives. I have only USB hard drives at this time, so the firewire ports are open.

It is tough because there are no firewire to USB and vice-versa adapters because of the difference in technology.

Any ideas?

There are adapters to go from Firewire to USB, however, they're expensive.

As far as using the Firewire ports, in addition to high speed hard drives, older digital cam corders are almost all Firewire equipped. And then there's hooking two Macs together in Target Mode, Firewire to Firewire.

It seems Firewire once the darling of Apple, is giving away to other technologies. Might be the reason Apple excluded placing a Firewire port on the new aluminum MacBook.

Regards.

Firewire will also work with many external optical drives. These will be bootable via firewire. You do not give your machine details in the avatar, however if it is a PPC model, external HDD are only bootable via firewire connections also.