Once upon a time a man bought a FF400 . He then , soon after , bought a Mac Mini. On trying to connect the two devices he realised he did not have the right cable for the job so he went to an online auction site  and bought the cheapest firewire 400 to 800 cable he could find , at the handsome price of 3 british pounds. Now , in the beginning the Mac Mini and the FF400 worked happily together with the aid of the cheapo cable. However , some days later the FF400 was no longer recognised by the Mac Mini. In fact , it turned out the MacMini had decided to ignore all external firewire devices completely and displayed the message " Warning - unable to list firewire devices' in his systems profiler.

So , a number of tests were run on the MM and low and behold it appeared that the Mac ................. actually, screw this................

I have a brand new mac mini (2010) and it has had to go back to the shop to be replaced by a new one because of a faulty firewire port. I bought a cheap lead and it worked for a while but I can't help thinking that it might have been the cheap lead that caused the MM to go nutso. The FF400 is fine , I have hooked it up to my ibook and it works no probs , with bus power as well. With the Mac Mini it has never worked through bus power but has with the power cable connected.

What I'd like to know is , before I fry another Mac Mini , which cable would you all recommend for FF400 to Mac Mini? Something stable. Money is no object.

I have looked at other threads but there are no definitive answers(or at least ones that make sense to me!). I read something about the firewire chips on certain macs being dodgy , and something else about a Lindy Hub. Something else about getting a good quality 400-800 cable .

So what is the score here ? Please give me some ideas , for the sake of the next poor little Mac Mini.