Time to finally dust out the 2008 Mac Pro and give it some new thermal paste! For fun, I added an extra 2 USB-C ports on an alpine ridge card, on top of a titan ridge card I had in there. This was my daily driver Mac from Late 2018 through Late 2021, when I switched to an M1 Mac mini then.
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What to do with it?
It’s gonna keep Mojave, and soon enough dual boot with a newer macOS. I found out Mojave is a sweet spot for syncing my old iOS 6 apps to the iPod touch 4th gen, as earlier macOSes have hoops to jump through in order to accomplish the same thing, versus a few years ago.
The app library for my old iCloud/iTunes account has ~90 apps, quite a few of which I paid. It’s how I got the Logitech Touch Mouse .IPA onto a 4th-gen iPod touch, to control the Power Mac G5 over Wi-Fi.
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For the time being it’s filled with cheap, large-ish capacity hard drives I snagged off of eBay. The Dual 6 TB HDDs came from the $55 OWC external USB 3.0 drive enclosure which supposedly wouldn’t work – the drives work in the Mac Pro just fine, and the enclosure I bought works A-ok with 2x 2 TB drives.
There’s another 3 TB Hitachi SATA HDD, helps give some more breathing room. I backup my PowerPC Macs to here with .sparsebundles, keep a clone of my own software repository, backups for the Intel Macs, as well as personal data.
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Not sure what I’ll do with all the extra USB-C ports, or how I’ll get the Thunderbolt part of the card’s functionality working since I said I wanted to stick to Mojave. Time and time again I’ve said it’s worth dual booting with a newer OS since it can do it, but I excused any upgrades by considering this machine was seldom used and just fine as it is.
The optical drive was ripped out since I don’t need it, snaked some extra SATA connectors into the optical bay, wired some white LED lights turned… neon green-white? Used Colin Mistr’s patcher sometime in 2019, stuffed it with 32 GB 800 MHz RAM (half of it failed already), swapped out dozens of random GPUs depending on the needs of other contemporary projects, and now it just has a 2 GB MSI Nvidia GT 710. Good enough for graphical hardware acceleration.
Since I’ve had access to Apple Silicon or Intel Macs which could more easily run newer OSes, this Mac Pro has stuck around as a backup machine. It’s still quite powerful.
