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Mac Pro mid-2010 High Sierra?

B

bjolester

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 28, 2018
98
24
Trondheim, Norway
I have a Mac Pro 5.1 mid-2010 (2.4ghz eight core) running El Capitan that I use in my music home studio. I have Logic Pro X installed on this machine, and plan to use it exclusively for music recording and production. I have three HDs installed on my Mac Pro, and my boot HD is the original Apple 512 SSD that came with the Mac.

I realise that the Logic Pro X 10.4 upgrade is only compatible with Sierra and High Sierra, and am contemplating upgrading my Mac Pro to High Sierra. Having said this, I have also read quite a lot about about High Sierra instability issues, for instance over at the Lloyd Chambers´ «macperformance guide» website.

Do any of you have experience with Mac Pro mid-2010 and High Sierra?

I am grateful for any advice on this matter!
 
bjolester said:
I have a Mac Pro 5.1 mid-2010 (2.4ghz eight core) running El Capitan that I use in my music home studio. I have Logic Pro X installed on this machine, and plan to use it exclusively for music recording and production. I have three HDs installed on my Mac Pro, and my boot HD is the original Apple 512 SSD that came with the Mac.

I realise that the Logic Pro X 10.4 upgrade is only compatible with Sierra and High Sierra, and am contemplating upgrading my Mac Pro to High Sierra. Having said this, I have also read quite a lot about about High Sierra instability issues, for instance over at the Lloyd Chambers´ «macperformance guide» website.

Do any of you have experience with Mac Pro mid-2010 and High Sierra?

I am grateful for any advice on this matter!
Click to expand...

The minimum requirement to run Logic Pro 10.4 is Sierra. So alternatively you could upgrade to Sierra which is totally solid on my 2010 Mac Pro.
 
I'm running OS 10.13.3 HS on my cMP 5,1 with upgraded CPUs, GPU, RAM and all is well. IMHO, it is extremely stable. Absolutely no issues for me.

Lou
 
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flowrider said:
I'm running OS 10.13.3 HS on my cMP 5,1 with upgraded CPUs, GPU, RAM and all is well. IMHO, it is extremely stable. Absolutely no issues for me.

Lou
Click to expand...

Lou, I too had (maybe still have) plans to upgrade to HS later. The situation with 3rd party GPUs seems to improve with every HS update while under Sierra there are limitations. At the moment there are two things that keep me from upgrading: 1. when it comes to Logic Pro HS still seems to be "immature" compared to Sierra. 2. I am afraid that additional Meltdown and Spectre patches could have an increasingly worse impact on our old Xeon CPUs- here I believe Apple will do more to protect and therefore patch HS and not (if at all) Sierra.
 
^^^^Can't address you No. 1, I don't use Logic Pro. No. 2, Meltdown and Spectre have been addressed by Apple (for Sierra & El Cap) with the release of security updates 5 days ago. I have noticed no slow down in HS since my last update.

Lou
 
I’ve been running HS for the last month on my 2010. It has been incredibly smooth and I have not had a single issue.
 
Sierra is perfect on my studio's Mac Pro. I'm hanging around the lowlands for a while longer, maybe for the rest of this machine's life, as I'm afraid the 4,1>5,1 might get altitude sickness under High Sierra.

PS: I'm running 4k from an AMD RX460, too.
 
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Thanks for sharing your experience with Mac Pro mid-2010 and MacOS High Sierra!

My Mac Pro mid-2010 is all original, so there should be no third party hardware compatibility issues with installing High Sierra. Maybe I will upgrade to Sierra first, but in the near future I would like to upgrade to High Sierra. It is a good thing to have the latest OS installed in order to keep the Mac safe. Who knows, maybe High Sierra will be the last MacOS to support Mac Pro 5.1?
 
I have a 4,1->5,1 MP. Stock GT120. I upgraded to HS, and it's never been a problem. I run FCPX on this. Based on the stability of this, I upgraded my 2013 15-MBP, and that didn't work out so well. I had CUDA installed, and it seems that with external 4K monitors, with scaling, there were graphic driver issues with significant slow downs (ex: tap a key, wait 20 seconds until it appears on screen; click a mouse and wait 20 seconds for action to occur). Took awhile to diagnose and unravel this. There's a thread on this elsewhere on MR.

But from my experience on the MP, and from others I know with a 5770, you should be fine.
 
bjolester said:
Maybe I will upgrade to Sierra first, but in the near future I would like to upgrade to High Sierra. It is a good thing to have the latest OS installed in order to keep the Mac safe. Who knows, maybe High Sierra will be the last MacOS to support Mac Pro 5.1?
Click to expand...
Skip Sierra and install High Sierra instead. Once macOS hits a .3 release it is generally very stable by that point.
And yes, latest OS release is generally considered to be the most secure.
 
It's good to hear that HS is finally getting some love after the 3rd update.

I don't know about the other posters but bjolester and I are Logic Pro users and he specifically mentioned Logic Pro 10.4. As long as Logic and HS don't cooperate like Logic and Sierra do I can't recommend installing HS. It won't hurt going to the mature Sierra first and then to (a more mature) HS later.
 
Squuiid said:
Are you sure the issues persist beyond 10.13.3? My understanding is that the new Logic 10.4 update and High Sierra 10.13.3 play well together. Can you shed some light on the specific problems you've found in this setup?

Here's a nice write-up of some of the new features in 10.4:
Logic Pros: An in-depth look at the new LPX Step and Phat FX units
Click to expand...

https://www.gearspace.com/board/mus...sierra-10-13-share-your-experiences-here.html

Reading the last page should suffice. While most of the severe problems have been solved, many minor pains remain, mostly incompatibilities with HS' AU validation and connected hardware. And once you're on HS don't even think about reverting back to Sierra unless you have a lot of time to waste.
 
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You have a Mac Pro so putting drives in/out is a piece of cake.
I’d get a new SSD, clone existing system and update the clone. If you find it all stable then stick with it. If you hate it, you have or original drive to go back to and then keep the new SSD as an extra drive.
 
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bjolester said:
Thanks for sharing your experience with Mac Pro mid-2010 and MacOS High Sierra!

My Mac Pro mid-2010 is all original, so there should be no third party hardware compatibility issues with installing High Sierra. Maybe I will upgrade to Sierra first, but in the near future I would like to upgrade to High Sierra. It is a good thing to have the latest OS installed in order to keep the Mac safe. Who knows, maybe High Sierra will be the last MacOS to support Mac Pro 5.1?
Click to expand...

If you cMP 5,1 is all original I would not update to HS! However, if you add an SSD to your machine, then by all means update to HS. HS runs slowly on HDDs and is built to take advantage of SSDs.

Lou
 
flowrider said:
If you cMP 5,1 is all original I would not update to HS! However, if you add an SSD to your machine, then by all means update to HS. HS runs slowly on HDDs and is built to take advantage of SSDs.

Lou
Click to expand...

The 5,1 has native SSD options from Apple. There may be some 5,1 is still in its original config but with SSD. But I totally agree that don't upgrade HS on to a HDD. My backup boot drive is a HDD, and that's painfully slow (not compare to SSD, but compare to the previous macOS / OSX).
 
flowrider said:
If you cMP 5,1 is all original I would not update to HS! However, if you add an SSD to your machine, then by all means update to HS. HS runs slowly on HDDs and is built to take advantage of SSDs.

Lou
Click to expand...

My Mac Pro mid-2010 2.4ghz eight core has the original Apple 512gb SSD installed, that I use as "boot" volume. I also have a OWC SSD installed that I use as a "master" volume, and lastly a HGST HDD for "backup".
 
Last edited:
^^^^You indicated your machine was all original, so I assumed there was no SSD installed. But, I do see that a 512GB SSD was indeed an option on the 2010 cMP.

Lou
 
leon771 said:
You have a Mac Pro so putting drives in/out is a piece of cake.
I’d get a new SSD, clone existing system and update the clone. If you find it all stable then stick with it. If you hate it, you have or original drive to go back to and then keep the new SSD as an extra drive.
Click to expand...


I'd also recommend doing a "clean install" of HS, especially if all you are using it for is music production with Logic Pro X 10.4.
 
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bjolester said:
The original Apple 512gb SSD was apparently made by Toshiba: https://macperformanceguide.com/SSD-RealWorld-BeforeAfter-AppleToshiba512.html

Do I run a risk using this SSD from 2010 as my "boot" volume, apart from the fact that it is slower that more recent SSDs?
Click to expand...

That's designed to be the boot disk. Of course no risk, but simply better utilise the SSD. On the other hand, some OWC SSD cannot boot High Sierra, that's a known issue. Which is a real risk.

And you shouldn't feel any difference. Neither faster or slower. Using SSD as a boot drive mainly because want to utilise its high IOPS, not the sequential speed. In general, almost all SSD (with any reasonable connection) give you virtually the same boot time and apps loading time.
Boot time.png
 
bjolester said:
Do I run a risk using this SSD from 2010 as my "boot" volume, apart from the fact that it is slower that more recent SSDs?
Click to expand...

I think you'll be fine with the Apple supplied SSD. However, your OWC SSD is suspect, and I would NOT use that as a boot drive.

Lou
 
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