Tag: mac

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Adding a cheap SSD to my 2008 Mac Pro

Windows 10 on my 2008 Mac Pro maxes out the disk i/o while booting, checking for updates and doing whatever it does after startup, plus add Steam and Origin to launch at boot and disk i/o sits at 100% for several minutes after boot. My Windows 10 disk up until now has been a cheap Hitachi/HGST 7200rpm 500GB HDD.

I boot Windows 10 on my Mac Pro only for occasional gaming, so I haven’t been overly eager to install an SSD. It wasn’t until these recent SSD deals with 480GB for as low as $65 that I decided to pick one up.

I’m aware that the 2008 Mac Pro only has a SATA2 disk controller by default so won’t be able to take advantage of the maximum SATA3 SSD speeds (max 600MB/s), but even at SATA2 bandwidth (max 300MB/s) the i/o will still be multiple times faster than what’s capable by a 7200rpm magnetic disk.

For the last couple of magnetic 2.5″ disks I added, I used a cheap $5 2.5 to 3.5″ 3d printed bracket from Amazon. While it works and holds the disks in place, it’s not sturdy enough to get the drives inserted into the SATA slots when you push the drive sled into the machine. You need to reach under to find the back of the drive and give it a push, then it seats into the slot. I decided to try a Sabrent metal bracket for the SSD. When it arrived I realized I had already used one of these in the past when installing an SSD into a 2012 MacBook Pro. These are pretty sturdy and work well:

$5 3d printed adapter on left, Sabrent adapter on right

A few notes as reminders to myself on the install:

  • Windows 10 will not install from the ISO burnt to a USB flash drive, no matter whether you set it up from Windows 10, MacOS, or Linux. I tried multiple times, and it will not boot. Strangely, MacOS will boot and install from a USB flash drive just fine.
  • Windows 10 will not install to a fresh, blank HD or SSD if there are other disks already in the Mac Pro. Remove all the other disks, leaving just the target disk for Windows 10. Boot from DVD, complete the install, then insert all the other disks back after completing the install
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Burning ISOs to disk on MacOS El Cap and later

Prior to El Cap, the Disk Utility on MacOS had an icon to burn an ISO to disk when you mounted the iso. For whatever reason this was removed in El Cap and after, but the ability to burn isos has always bee provided from the Finder.

Right-click an iso file in the Finder and you’ll see a burn option. More info in this article here.

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Adding a 2.5″ drive to a Mac Pro 2008

I have a couple of spare 500GB 2.5″ drives that were going to go into my HP DL380 rack server, but for the reasons described here, I ended up replacing with some WD drives instead. So I wanted to install these in my Mac Pro instead to at least get some use from them.

The pre ‘trash can’ Mac Pro towers have 4 slide out drive trays (see here across the center of the case) that allow you to easily install or remove 3.5″ drives without messing with any cables. Attach a drive into a drive sled, screw in the 4 screws on the sled and then push it in.

For 2.5″ drives however, they obviously won’t fit into the drive sled. There’s a number of adapter options if you just Google for “mac pro 2.5 drive adapter” or similar, and the prices are all over from $5 to $30 or more.

I went for a cheaper $5 option on Amazon. When the adapter arrived, what’s interesting is it looks like the adapter was 3D printed:

The kit came with easy to follow instructions and needed screws.

 

 

Following the instructions and attaching the drive, here’s what it looks like with the adapter fitted into one of the drive sleds:

 

 

 

On booting up, the top drive is the original disk that came in this used Mac Pro, it has an HFS+ partition installed with El Cap, and a partition installed with  Windows 10. The 2nd is the newly added 2.5″ 500GB disk. Great!

 

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Initial thoughts with a new 15″ 2015 Macbook Pro

My 15″ 2012 MacBook Pro started to get unreliable in the past couple of months, with random kernel panic reboots and the ominous “Your computer restarted because of an issue“. Looking in the Console app at the error logs, there were a number of common errors, mainly with the Intel HD graphics. It’s clear something was starting to fail, as having this MacBook Pro as my daily driver for 5 years I’d gone from not rebooting for months (I’d just sleep it over night), to having a random hang then reboot once every couple of weeks, and it started to get more frequent.

Long story short, upgrading to High Sierra was the first OS X or MacOS upgrade that I’d experienced a failure during the install (I’ve gone through 10.5 Leopard, through 10.12 Sierra). I had two disks in this MBP, one SSD and one HDD. Installing High Sierra to my SSD, apparently High Sierra upgrades SSDs by default to the new APFS file system, which is only supported on High Sierra, and apparently is not reversible back to HFS+. So I ended up with a 5 year old machine with a failed upgrade and would boot to a black screen with a spinning progress circle and not get any further. Booting from my second drive which had El Cap on it, it couldn’t see the now APFS drive, and then also started crashing on startup where previously was fine. i spent far too long trying to reinstall a fresh install of El Cap and Sierra and couldn’t get back to a stable place. Even when I did get El Cap cleanly installed, it would crash after a couple of minutes after logging on, so clearly the time had come for this 5 year old machine to be retired.

So, new 15″ 2015 Macbook Pro. Externally it looks very similar to the 2012, with a few minor differences:

  • It’s slightly smaller
  • It’s thiner
  • Noticeably lighter
  • The front cutaway section when you insert your thumb to open the screen is not as deep and doesn’t have edges as sharp (which I always thought was weird on the the 2012)

More significant changes:

  • The Retina screen is INCREDIBLE. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a screen that is so sharp. Text is incredibly sharp and clear in all apps, and the level of detail even in the stock background images is mindblowing
  • The keyboard style is noticeably different. The travel on the keys is much shorter and softer, even squidgy. At first I’d describe the feel as what my 2012 keyboard feels like now it’s well worn after 5 years of daily usage, but after a few days of using it, it feels good for typing, as with less resistance and travel, there’s less need to really mash the keys. I’m not sure if the 2015 has the new butterfly style keys, but either way, a very noticeable change
  • It runs cold to the touch, even after being on for a few hours (my 2012 would get warm, and even hot if you were doing something intensive like editing a video)

The single most impressive change that actually prompted me to write this short review is the new touchpad. I could not put my finger on (pun intended) what was different with the touchpad and how it felt. At first I thought it was similar to the shorter, lighter travel of the keys, in that maybe the travel of the touchpad when you click it had been reduced. I did a quick search to read about what had changed, and then it clicked (ha!). The haptic feedback from the touchpad really does feel like it’s clicking, but without the physical movement it feels a bit odd. I’m not sure at this point if it’s better than before, but it’s definitely interesting and a very clever approach. I understand this was a design change to allow the thiner/lighter MacBooks and MacBook Airs to be even thinner without a touchpad that physically moved. Anyway, it was a lightbulb moment when I read about the haptic feedback.

So far, very impressed and pleased with my new machine. I hope that this one too will last another 5 years 🙂

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