macOS High Sierra (10.13) Unsupported Macs Thread

[jhowarth]

You should have put an SSD in your Mac laptop 5 years ago. The performance boost is HUGE! Which machine do you have though?

And don't put in any old SSD you have lying around either. Put in one with reasonable performance even by 2018 standards. While you don't need the fastest, up to a certain point, the faster the SSD, the faster your machine will feel. A moderately fast recent model should suffice.

See my post on the subject earlier in the thread, here:

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ed-macs-thread.2048478/page-163#post-26387075

Of course the late-2008 MacBook Pro only has SATA II, so he will leaving some of the potential I/O performance on the table.

That actually brings up a ROM patcher question. Has anyone checked to see if PCIe 2.0 cards like the Sonnet Tempo 6Gb/s SATA recognize APBS partitions on SSDs installed on it after APBS ROM patching?

 

[mrploppy]

You should have put an SSD in your Mac laptop 5 years ago. The performance boost is HUGE! Which machine do you have though?

And don't put in any old SSD you have lying around either. Put in one with reasonable performance even by 2018 standards. While you don't need the fastest, up to a certain point, the faster the SSD, the faster your machine will feel. A moderately fast recent model should suffice.

See my post on the subject earlier in the thread, here:

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ed-macs-thread.2048478/page-163#post-26387075

Thanks. Mine's a MacBook Pro late 2008 (MacBookPro5,1). As @jhowarth points out it's only SATA II, but I should still expect some improvement, no? I had seen your earlier post, and was about to ask for recommendations. I currently have 500GB, not even half full, but I can't imagine going to less than 500GB. I haven't done any research yet - SSDs are a whole new ballgame for me.

 

[tsialex]

Of course the late-2008 MacBook Pro only has SATA II, so he will leaving some of the potential I/O performance on the table.

That actually brings up a ROM patcher question. Has anyone checked to see if PCIe 2.0 cards like the Sonnet Tempo 6Gb/s SATA recognize APBS partitions on SSDs installed on it after APBS ROM patching?

It's not the PCIe card that recognise the APFS partition, but the Mac Pro firmware.

If the BootROM was injected with the APFS DXE, it will recognize APFS disks on every way you can connect/boot a disk on a 2008 Mac Pro:

• FireWire
• USB2.0
• SATA
• PATA (ODD bay one)
  
• PCIe RAID cards
• PCIe SATA controllers
• PCIe M2 AHCI adapters

 

[EugW]

Of course the late-2008 MacBook Pro only has SATA II, so he will leaving some of the potential I/O performance on the table.

Thanks. Mine's a MacBook Pro late 2008 (MacBookPro5,1). As @jhowarth points out it's only SATA II, but I should still expect some improvement, no? I had seen your earlier post, and was about to ask for recommendations. I currently have 500GB, not even half full, but I can't imagine going to less than 500GB. I haven't done any research yet - SSDs are a whole new ballgame for me.

It should be noted that the most important speed to assess here is random read/write speed, and not so much maximum sequential speed. The perception of performance is mostly dependent on random speeds, and these are usually much, much slower than maximum sequential speed.

SATA II is still a bottleneck, but much less of a bottleneck for random speed. Even some modern SSDs won't always max out SATA II bandwidth with their random 4K read/write speeds.

 

[mrploppy]

It should be noted that the most important speed to assess here is random read/write speed, and not so much maximum sequential speed. The perception of performance is mostly dependent on random speeds, and these are usually much, much slower than maximum sequential speed.

SATA II is still a bottleneck, but much less of a bottleneck for random speed. Even some modern SSDs won't always max out SATA II bandwidth with their random 4K read/write speeds.

Do you know anything about the Crucial MX500?

The Samsung 850 EVO is already 4-year old technology and the 860 is over £100. The Crucial is just over £80.

Others?

 

[jhowarth]

Do you know anything about the Crucial MX500?

The Samsung 850 EVO is already 4-year old technology and the 860 is over £100. The Crucial is just over £80.

Others?

I am using a SanDisk 250GB Ultra 3D NAND SATA III SSD. These provide sequential read 550MB/s and sequential write 525MB/s. The 3D layered chips are state of the art and perform better than the older designs. These go for as little as $57 at the moment. If you are prepared to wait a few months, there have been articles claiming that we are on the verge of a SSD price collapse.

 

[EugW]

I am using a SanDisk 250GB Ultra 3D NAND SATA III SSD. These provide sequential read 550MB/s and sequential write 525MB/s. The 3D layered chips are state of the art and perform better than the older designs. These go for as little as $57 at the moment. If you are prepared to wait a few months, there have been articles claiming that we are on the verge of a SSD price collapse.

Again, sequential transfer speeds are not the concern here, esp. on these old SATA II machines. The main thing you should be looking at are random transfer speeds. However, most mainstream mid-range and up drives are fine.

https://www.storagereview.com/sandisk_ultra_3d_ssd_review

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12408/the-samsung-860-evo-m2-2tb-ssd-review/5

Bigger drives also tend to be faster than smaller drives.

 

[mrploppy]

Again, sequential transfer speeds are not the concern here, esp. on these old SATA II machines. The main thing you should be looking at are random transfer speeds. However, most mainstream mid-range and up drives are fine.

Thanks. At the moment, I'm leaning towards the Crucial but we'll see. With hard drives I know who the usual suspects are - so it's strange to see brands you'd normally associate with compact flash and that kind of thing.
[doublepost=1535900624][/doublepost]Here's a question regarding APFS and backups. I can't seem to get my head around this.

What I normally do with backups is ... not backup. Then every once in a while I'll have a fright and what I end up doing is cloning my internal drive to an external 1TB USB drive (old school spinner), on which I also keep installers and other family members' cloned drives. To achieve this, I boot into a Recovery partition and use the Restore function in Disk Utility to create the cloned backup (I think ... see, I do it so infrequently that I've forgotten). As far as I'm aware that gives me a bootable version of my internal drive on my external drive (but I've never tried it). All the partitions I currently have on the external drive are HFS+.

So, let's say I now have my new SSD as my internal drive consisting of my HS installation as APFS. Questions:

1. To back it up, would I just use Restore as before to create a clone of my HS onto my external drive?
2. Would that result in an APFS partition (or whatever the correct term is) on the external drive and would it happily co-exist with the HFS partitions already on there?
3. Would the backup HS be bootable from the external drive?
4. Would there still be a bootable Recovery partition somewhere?
5. If I needed to restore the backup back to the internal drive, would I boot from another partition e.g. Recovery, and use DU's Restore to copy the backup back to the internal drive.

Again, so many questions. TIA.

 

[jhowarth]

Thanks. At the moment, I'm leaning towards the Crucial but we'll see. With hard drives I know who the usual suspects are - so it's strange to see brands you'd normally associate with compact flash and that kind of thing.
[doublepost=1535900624][/doublepost]Here's a question regarding APFS and backups. I can't seem to get my head around this.

What I normally do with backups is ... not backup. Then every once in a while I'll have a fright and what I end up doing is cloning my internal drive to an external 1TB USB drive (old school spinner), on which I also keep installers and other family members' cloned drives. To achieve this, I boot into a Recovery partition and use the Restore function in Disk Utility to create the cloned backup (I think ... see, I do it so infrequently that I've forgotten). As far as I'm aware that gives me a bootable version of my internal drive on my external drive (but I've never tried it). All the partitions I currently have on the external drive are HFS+.

So, let's say I now have my new SSD as my internal drive consisting of my HS installation as APFS. Questions:

1. To back it up, would I just use Restore as before to create a clone of my HS onto my external drive?
2. Would that result in an APFS partition (or whatever the correct term is) on the external drive and would it happily co-exist with the HFS partitions already on there?
3. Would the backup HS be bootable from the external drive?
4. Would there still be a bootable Recovery partition somewhere?
5. If I needed to restore the backup back to the internal drive, would I boot from another partition e.g. Recovery, and use DU's Restore to copy the backup back to the internal drive.

Again, so many questions. TIA.

Note that you will want to make sure TRIM is enabled on your SSD to even wear across the device. Some brands aren't enabled by default by macOS, like the SanDisk 3D Ultra, but this can be done with...

sudo trimforce enable

 

[roronl]

Thanks. At the moment, I'm leaning towards the Crucial but we'll see. With hard drives I know who the usual suspects are - so it's strange to see brands you'd normally associate with compact flash and that kind of thing.
[doublepost=1535900624][/doublepost]Here's a question regarding APFS and backups. I can't seem to get my head around this.

What I normally do with backups is ... not backup. Then every once in a while I'll have a fright and what I end up doing is cloning my internal drive to an external 1TB USB drive (old school spinner), on which I also keep installers and other family members' cloned drives. To achieve this, I boot into a Recovery partition and use the Restore function in Disk Utility to create the cloned backup (I think ... see, I do it so infrequently that I've forgotten). As far as I'm aware that gives me a bootable version of my internal drive on my external drive (but I've never tried it). All the partitions I currently have on the external drive are HFS+.

So, let's say I now have my new SSD as my internal drive consisting of my HS installation as APFS. Questions:

1. To back it up, would I just use Restore as before to create a clone of my HS onto my external drive?
2. Would that result in an APFS partition (or whatever the correct term is) on the external drive and would it happily co-exist with the HFS partitions already on there?
3. Would the backup HS be bootable from the external drive?
4. Would there still be a bootable Recovery partition somewhere?
5. If I needed to restore the backup back to the internal drive, would I boot from another partition e.g. Recovery, and use DU's Restore to copy the backup back to the internal drive.

Again, so many questions. TIA.

Stop with cloning:
https://macmost.com/stop-cloning-your-hard-drive-as-a-backup.html

 

[mrploppy]

Stop with cloning:
https://macmost.com/stop-cloning-your-hard-drive-as-a-backup.html

Ha! Did you read the comments on that article?

Thanks for your concern, but I don't use cloning as a means of "daily backup", or even periodic backup. Nothing changes significantly on my Mac from day to day. My email is gmail. Lots of stuff is in iCloud. I don't use it as a means of finding an accidentally deleted file. I rarely delete anything - I have over 200GB spare. I do have a concern though that one day the whole drive will crap out. If/when that happens I'll just go back to the last time I cloned my drive (which was just before the 10.13.6 installation) and I'll be fine, thank you very much.

Having worked in the software industry for over 35 years, I'm well aware of the importance of backups. But I'll tell you something that's even more important: making sure that the backups you've made are usable. We had the situation where we'd been happily making backups for months (incrementals, full monthlies, etc) and then something died. When we went to restore our stuff we found that there was something wrong with the backup software or something (can't remember exactly), and the only thing we could get back was a full backup done some weeks previously. So yeah. When was the last time you did a full restore of your system to prove that your backups are good?

 

[jhowarth]

Thanks. At the moment, I'm leaning towards the Crucial but we'll see. With hard drives I know who the usual suspects are - so it's strange to see brands you'd normally associate with compact flash and that kind of thing.
[doublepost=1535900624][/doublepost]Here's a question regarding APFS and backups. I can't seem to get my head around this.

What I normally do with backups is ... not backup. Then every once in a while I'll have a fright and what I end up doing is cloning my internal drive to an external 1TB USB drive (old school spinner), on which I also keep installers and other family members' cloned drives. To achieve this, I boot into a Recovery partition and use the Restore function in Disk Utility to create the cloned backup (I think ... see, I do it so infrequently that I've forgotten). As far as I'm aware that gives me a bootable version of my internal drive on my external drive (but I've never tried it). All the partitions I currently have on the external drive are HFS+.

So, let's say I now have my new SSD as my internal drive consisting of my HS installation as APFS. Questions:

1. To back it up, would I just use Restore as before to create a clone of my HS onto my external drive?
2. Would that result in an APFS partition (or whatever the correct term is) on the external drive and would it happily co-exist with the HFS partitions already on there?
3. Would the backup HS be bootable from the external drive?
4. Would there still be a bootable Recovery partition somewhere?
5. If I needed to restore the backup back to the internal drive, would I boot from another partition e.g. Recovery, and use DU's Restore to copy the backup back to the internal drive.

Again, so many questions. TIA.

I would try the latest beta of Carbon Copy Cloner which supports Mojave. With Boot ROM patched machines, it should be straight forward but with the APFS patched machines, you probably will have to reapply the patches for the EFI partition.

 

[Yipee2016]

Hello.

I have a Mac Pro 3.1. I had a Radeon 6870 and I decided to change for a GTX 680. I bought a PC GTX 680 and I flashed it. It works well on Mac MacPro (I can see the Boot Menu) but, in High Sierra I don't have graphics acceleration. Do you know what I have to do ?

 

[EugW]

Stop with cloning:
https://macmost.com/stop-cloning-your-hard-drive-as-a-backup.html

I had so many problem with Time Machine that eventually I completely gave up on Time Machine.

Instead, I bought a NAS, and most of my main files are on the NAS.
Then I bought a second NAS, and the first NAS is backed up to the second NAS on a daily basis located physically on the opposite side of the house. This is all done automatically every day at 4 am. And that first NAS is also backed up locally to an external hard drive beside it. This is done automatically every day at 2 am. Backups are incremental, so they don't take very long.

I then got a safety deposit box and copied my most important files to hard drives which will go into the safety deposit box. I must admit though, those drives are currently just sitting on my desk. But at least they are disconnected backups.

So I usually have about 4 copies of my main files, and will be keeping one copy off-site.

 

[kohlson]

Of course the late-2008 MacBook Pro only has SATA II

Something to consider - it may not apply to you, but ...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ssds-sata-and-negotiated-link-speeds.2047851/

 

[EugW]

Something to consider - it may not apply to you, but ...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ssds-sata-and-negotiated-link-speeds.2047851/

Excellent post. My Samsung 840 EVO negotiates at SATA II but my Intel 330 negotiates at SATA I.

That thread says many SandForce drives will only negotiate at SATA I with these old machines, and the Intel 330 is SandForce.

 

[kohlson]

I have an older Sandisk (I think) in a 2008 15-MBP, and noticed that negotiated speed was 1.5Gbits. On investigation, I found that there was a firmware mod to make it run 3Gbits. And now it does. My recommendation is to find a drive you like, and then do some googling with the make/model, macOS, and "negotiated link speed." That should help you find a drive that works at 3Gbits.

 

[jhowarth]

Excellent post. My Samsung 840 EVO negotiates at SATA II but my Intel 330 negotiates at SATA I.

That thread says many SandForce drives will only negotiate at SATA I with these old machines, and the Intel 330 is SandForce.

I doubt that will be an issue unless you have a really crappy off-brand SSD that didn't properly code SATA II fallback from SATA III. On my MacPro 3,1 all three WDC hard drives as well as the SanDisk 3D Ultra SSD show 3 Gb/s for the negotiated SATA speed.

 

[amstel78]

I guess I'm coming to that conclusion too. This is my main, and only, laptop/desktop so bricking it would be catastrophic for me.

I'm still tempted to install an SSD though, just for sh!ts 'n' grins really. So then my only decision would be whether to leave as HFS+ or convert to APFS but with the apfs post-install patch. I'm an old Unix guy (old guy, not old Unix) so seeing verbose output doesn't bother me at all. I see lots of people saying that upgrading to SSD is worthwhile, even with HFS+. I'm maxed out on RAM so this is all I have left in terms of performance improvement.

Thoughts?

HFS+ on my WD 1TB SSD is blazing fast. Hence the reason I'm not in hurry to upgrade. The thought of bricking a perfectly good Mac Pro tends to scare me as well. Why fix it if it ain't broken?

 

[EugW]

I doubt that will be an issue unless you have a really crappy off-brand SSD that didn't properly code SATA II fallback from SATA III. On my MacPro 3,1 all three WDC hard drives as well as the SanDisk 3D Ultra SSD show 3 Gb/s for the negotiated SATA speed.

Uh what? As mentioned, my Intel 330 is... well... an Intel drive. Intel is one of the most well-respected SSD manufacturers in the world. It negotiates at only SATA I speeds, but that's because it's an older drive with a SandForce chipset.

SandForce chipsets were extremely common a few years ago, so if you are trying to use one of these, you may encounter this.

Luckily, for random speeds it's probably not such a big deal, because the drive is the bottleneck anyway most of the time, but for sequential speeds this could be a problem. But luckily there too, most people running these drives on these old machines shouldn't be overly worried about sequential speeds.

 

[mnsiw]

Hi MacBook 5,1, anyone downgraded from Mojave to High Sierra, please share your reason, is High Sierra running better than Mojave?

 

[MobiusStrip]

Hi guys. I swear I wasn't lazy and I did try to find a reference to this, but I'm resorting to posting a new question:

I installed the patched High Sierra on my 2007 iMac, and now on boot I get the circle & slash "prohibited" screen. I did boot into recovery mode before the install and disabled SIP.

What is the usual cause of this screen coming up? Thanks.

 

[TimothyR734]

Hi guys. I swear I wasn't lazy and I did try to find a reference to this, but I'm resorting to posting a new question:

I installed the patched High Sierra on my 2007 iMac, and now on boot I get the circle & slash "prohibited" screen. I did boot into recovery mode before the install and disabled SIP.

What is the usual cause of this screen coming up? Thanks.

Did you apply the post install patches with macOS High Sierra patcher
[doublepost=1536384669][/doublepost]

Hi MacBook 5,1, anyone downgraded from Mojave to High Sierra, please share your reason, is High Sierra running better than Mojave?

I have a macbook 5,2 and just did a clean install of High Sierra might be best route as both HS and Mojave are different

 

[MobiusStrip]

Did you apply the post install patches with macOS High Sierra patcher

Bah! I guess I didn't scroll down far enough on the instruction page, because I missed all of the post-install instructions. Thanks!

 

[TimothyR734]

Your welcome !!!