At least on OSX, I've always found FireWire to be excellent, and I remember being an early adopter of the format with a CD-R Drive I bought along with my Titanium Powerbook g4 in the summer of 2001. In the Past 16 years it's been *much* more stable than USB.
With the introduction of USB-C, it seems that even Apple is no longer supporting FW, though in theory you can use a Thunderbolt 3 compliant USB-C > Thunderbolt 2 adaptor in conjunction with a Thunderbolt 2> FW 800 adaptor and a 800>400 cable.
I haven't tried it myself, not owning a 7 series recorder, but I'd be very surprised if the above didn't work perfectly on a modern Macintosh. I bet transfer speeds would be similar to USB-2.