Early 2008 to Early 2009

[Jigga Beef]

A friend of mine is going to "give" me his old Early 2009 Mac Pro. It's a siginifant upgrade from my current early 2008 Mac Pro 3,1.

I am HOPING i can just take out my current hard drives and put them in the early 2009 machine without much trouble. Obviously it will save tim with migration and things of that nature.

Will this work or is that too simple and will lead to some issues down the line.

Bay 1: Boot drive is an SSD,
bay 2: clone of SSD Boot
Bay 3: iTunes drive
Bay: 4 clone of iTunes drive


I figured I may have some issues with the clones but I can always adjust those with CCC.


Also do we think the next macOS will run on the early 2009. Part of my reason for upgrading is to get up and running on the latest OS since both of my laptops run that.

 

[Macschrauber]

You need to fiddle a bit to run Sierra on the Mac Pro 4.1. See the regarding thread. If you have a wifi card in your mac this _could_ prevent booting.

Just swap the Drives, it should run. Take a look at time machine backups, these are stamped with your unique machine ID.

 

[Beagl3]

Officially, the 2009 Mac Pro is out of software support already. But since Apple sold the Mac Pro 5.1 until 2013, i personally think your machine will see at least the next 1-2 major macOS releases if you apply the 4.1->5.1 firmware upgrade.