Wanting to connect Powermac 8 to 2012 Imac - Best way?

Hi,

I'm trying to connect a Powermac 8 to a 2012 iMac in order to access an external drive docked to the iMac. Originally I had thought to buy a male to male USB cable, but I realized that this probably was a bad idea due to USB 3.0 / 2.0 compatibility issues...

At any rate, right now I am thinking that a firewire to thunderbolt adapter might work but I want to be sure I'm not making a terrible choice here. Can anyone help me figure this out?

Thanks,

M

USB 3.0 is backward compatible with USB 2.0. The reverse, however, will not work because the USB 3.0 cable has a different male connector. Consequently, you should be able to attach the external USB 3.0 drive to your Powermac using a standard USB 2.0 cable. The transfer speed will be the same as USB 2.0.

Ah, I neglected to mention: the external only has thunderbolt ports. No USB at all, as a matter of fact!

Can you connect the Thunderbird drive to the 2012 iMac, and then the 2012 iMac to the iMac G5 via Ethernet?


https://it.uoregon.edu/connect-macs

Would "assume" you have a network in the house both of these machines use to access the internet? In which case you can just share the drive from the iMac to access it via the network.

Hope this helps:
Mac OS: How to Connect to File Sharing or Apple File Services (AFP)