Since I switched to a Mac, I really appreciate those moments where you discover a feature that would (again) simplify your life and when you say to yourself: “Wow, they also think about that? How cool is that!”

I discovered an actually common feature to Macs where you can bind them through Firewire to easily transfert data at high-speed. I wanted to move a 6 gigs file from a Mac to another and I expected the task to be quite complicated and very slow — using whether my LAN or my Wifi access.

A friend of mine told me to use the “Firewire Target Mode” built-in Macs. Basically, it’s a way to mount a Mac on another as if it were a simple external drive. The procedure is quite simple. You power off the Mac you want to mount, you connect a Firewire cable, you boot and press “T”. A Firewire icon appears in full screen and you see a disk icon appearing on the other Mac. That simple.

Mac veteran know it for a long time but it’s quite pleasant to try it. I’ve been able to transfer my 6 gigs file in 5 minutes. No trouble.

I definitely love Macs.

For more information, see How to use FireWire target disk mode from Apple Support Center.