MP 6,1 Best way to deal with SSD upgrade on a new Mac Pro

[darkus]

I plan on buying a Mac Pro 6,1 (yes yes...) today but the stock 256GB is just way to small.

I plan on running 2 separate bootcamp installs on this Mac as well

Whats the best way of doing this? I was planning on buying a 1 or 2TB SSD at the same time, but is there only 1 slot for a HD?

If so, if I change the stock drive to the new drive, what is the best way to format the thing and then get OSX installed onto it? I'd like everything to be as stock as possible, what would be the best drive format to be ready for bootcamp? How do I get into a Disk Utility with a fresh drive?

Thanks! (Noobie as you can tell...)

 

[Soba]

I'm not an expert on the 6,1, but are you aware the SSD in these systems is proprietary? You will need an adapter to install a standard M.2 blade into this system and compatibility is not always straightforward.

You said you're buying this system "today" and I see from your other thread you're doing this with the goal of saving space, but I get the feeling you should reconsider and research in more depth. The 6,1 is a good option for virtually no one, unless you are getting it at a bargain basement, fire sale price and perhaps not even then. The 2013 Mac Pro is dead man walking and was frankly never a good system design (at least not for most people).

 

[MCal27]

Seconded.. unless you found one cheap s/h I say steer clear... It’s a flawed design which was virtually abandoned at Birth by Apple. I sold mine a few weeks ago, but many of us had Graphical freeze issues.. I have a client using one who’s USB ports constantly drop all connected peripherals, and you now struggle to find peripherals for it’s main I/O interface (TB2).

That being said I upgraded the SSD in mine from the 256 to a 512GB by finding used Apple SSD’s on ebay. You should find a suitable one quite easily if you don’t fancy the NVME adapter route.

 

[ChrisA]

I plan on buying a Mac Pro 6,1 (yes yes...) today but the stock 256GB is just way to small.

The best upgrade is to buy an external Thunderbolt SSD and use it in addition to the stock 256GB SSD. Boot from the smaller internal storage and keep data on the external.

Then later when the Mac is replace moving the data to the new mac is trivial.

 

[orph]

1 grab OSX installer from the apple shop thing
2 use installer to install OSX on to a USB stick
3 drag installer on to USB stick
4 boot from usb stick
(if you are new to osx, the USB stick can be selected to boot from in the startup disk panel)

5 install SSD in to 6,1
6 boot from USB stick and use osx installer to install OSX on to the new ssd
7 fresh install of osx on 6,1 time to have fun

that is how i do it every time, seems like the simplest way to work & lets me swap between computers fast.
as a big plus the USB stick with osx installed on can be used for troubleshooting if you ever hit a problem.

if you need any data on the original SSD do back it up in advance
if you want to sell the old SSD make sure it's wiped if you have any data on it
may be worth looking to see if you can get a USB box for it if you want to use it as a drive.

ps you can also just hold 'alt' on startup to chose the USB stick.

 

[nguyenhm16]

NVMe with ST-NGFF2013-C; Vega Internal GPU; Mac Pro 2013 (6,1)

Update: Beginning of thread is mostly NVME related. Work for replacing internal GPU with a 3rd-party GPU starts later in the thread (in progress). The thread is still active. Questions and comments for both NVME and GPU are welcome. Update: On Mac Pro (late 2013) don't mix APFS and NTFS on...

forums.macrumors.com

I bought the recommended Sintech adapter and have successfully run 970EVO and now 970PRO M.2 SSDs on my trash can. Has been rock solid. System currently running Catalina as of a few days ago.

 

[th0masp]

Same experience here with the Sintech adapter and the 970 Pro. The thread linked in post #6 contains all the info to get started with an aftermarket SSD replacement. Just keep your original one around for firmware updates down the road.

I'm not sure about any Bootcamp related things to look out for though - never even looked at it (always had PCs alongside Macs).