Maverick and SSDs upgrade on Mac Pros

[cbt3]

In my office we are looking to upgrade our Mac Pros, we have 4x Mac Pros 5,1 with OSX 10.6 on them. I figured now would be a good time to upgrade to 10.9, they need to run the adobe design suite CS5, and Quark 9, would there be any issues with those programs? Also I was going to try and get some new SSDs and boot drives, I feel like it would be much faster to just upgrade the OS to 10.9 then clone it, or would I be better off starting fresh then having to re-install all of my software?

I also have a Mac Pro 4,1 that I would similarly want to upgrade with a new SSD and 10.9, I am running FCP7 and I had heard after effects was having trouble with 10.9, should I be concerned?

 

[cbt3]

bump

 

[VirtualRain]

I would say upgrade your existing drives and the clone to the new SSDs. OS X is not like Windows where it needs a clean install every 6 months to continue working properly.

 

[Macsonic]

In my office we are looking to upgrade our Mac Pros, we have 4x Mac Pros 5,1 with OSX 10.6 on them. I figured now would be a good time to upgrade to 10.9, they need to run the adobe design suite CS5, and Quark 9, would there be any issues with those programs? Also I was going to try and get some new SSDs and boot drives, I feel like it would be much faster to just upgrade the OS to 10.9 then clone it, or would I be better off starting fresh then having to re-install all of my software?

I also have a Mac Pro 4,1 that I would similarly want to upgrade with a new SSD and 10.9, I am running FCP7 and I had heard after effects was having trouble with 10.9, should I be concerned?

Hi Cbt3 If you plan to upgrade to 10.9 Mavericks, best to first have a clone of your original boot drive so if you encounter problems with Mavericks, you could easily revert back to your original OS and settings. This BLOG site mentions to first wait for fixes to be released before using Mavericks.

 

[matt321]

cbt3,

I would do this:

-Clone the current 10.6 drive to the new SSD. Put the old drive on the shelf as a backup.

-Make sure all of your current applications are up to date so they will run on 10.9.

-Upgrade the new SSD from 10.6 to 10.9.

This makes it easy to go back to 10.6 if things go wrong (just swap in the old drives.)

Also, don't go over-board on SSD's for the Mac Pro's. The SATA ports are only 3G, so almost any modern SSD will max out. I would definitely go with size over speed because of this restriction.

 

[Johnsyounger]

You will have to download an Adobe update to run Maverick and After Effects, but it works...(CS6 anyway)

 

[scottsjack]

On my 5,1 I already had Mavericks on a HD. I cloned it to a Crucial 960GB M500. Photoshop CS6 works fine. Mavericks has a couple of well-documented goofy issues but nothing really bad on my machine.

The Mavericks SSD has back and forth a couple of times between the lower bay, upper bay and a Sonnet Tempo PCIe card. It has worked equally great in each position.

It's "great" is a faster "great" on the PCIe card but I also run Windows 8 so I need the boot screen. Once I get a real Windows PC the SSD will stay on PCIe.