What have you done with an early Intel recently?

[Amethyst1]

Hooked up my Samsung 970 Evo in an Akitio Thunder2 to my 2015 iMac 4K (TB2). ≈1370 MB/s max.
Now... why are there so few TB2 enclosures for m.2 blades? They've been around since 2013, but "empty" enclosures only appeared in 2017(?), with TB3. I'm only aware of the LaCie Little Big Disk (2014) and the Sonnet Fusion PCIe (2015).
I could just use a TB3 enclosure, necessitating a TB3-to-TB2 adapter and a TB2 device/dock.

 

[DCBassman]

Yet another rehash of the Macs I'm keeping.
iMac 12,1: Sonoma, using it completely as-is, ie no Firefox or Thunderbird.
Macbook Pro 2011 early: Catalina. This also contains copies of all the various macOS installers. as well as apps that I use.
Macbook Pro 2011 late: MX Linux. Backup daily driver, and away-from-home machine.

And now a question: with two Macs running, what size drive should I put in the Time Machine? Neither is used for anything significant. Current drive in there is 1.5TB.

 

[DCBassman]

And now a question: with two Macs running, what size drive should I put in the Time Machine? Neither is used for anything significant. Current drive in there is 1.5TB.

Scrub that. Put a 1TB spinner in a USB3 nclosure and plugged it into the Elgato TB2 dock, just for the iMac Time Machine. Should be enough space, and it's reasonably fast. Time Capsule to back up the Catalina laptop.

 

[MBAir2010]

Scrub that. Put a 1TB spinner in a USB3 nclosure and plugged it into the Elgato TB2 dock, just for the iMac Time Machine. Should be enough space, and it's reasonably fast. Time Capsule to back up the Catalina laptop.

what device are we using for time machine? I never gave wireless or a multi mac back up a thought.
i know  made a time capsule while i was tech'n last decade or so, and might consider that.
i ask because i am now these 2 hours designing a graphic in CS4 and will save the file of art and designs on a thumb drive, then place those on 3 "early intel" macs as perhaps a machine can do this instead.

 

[eyoungren]

This is my MacPro (pics posted from my 2011 MBA). It would appear that my KVM switch is sufficent to be seen as a USB 2.0 Hub (it is USB 2.0).



I do actually have a 2.0 hub attached to the MP though. The Installer is running off of that. But my keyboard/mouse are plugged in to the KVM and not the hub.

 

[eyoungren]

…and Sonoma!

Got to make sure you install those post install root patches. I knew that, but it was still a moment of worry until all my screens came back.



I did have to reset wallpaper, but not a big deal.

 

[avz]

Finally the situation around Mac OS X Mavericks installer app started to make some sort of sense to me. Even though it is the first one to include createinstallmedia it was never meant to be put on a USB stick(even though it somewhat worked for me in the past). From my experience I would say that the same applies to Yosemite and El Capitan.

When people use Lion or Mountain Lion way of creating Mavericks USB installer they end up with an installation that does not have a recovery partition. This is very easy to solve by starting Mavericks installer app in Applications(the way it was meant to be done) and doing re-installation.

 

[eyoungren]

If anyone uses Fliqlo (flipclock screensaver) on Sonoma and it's not working, you'll want to delete the old and then reinstall the new. I had a black screen for it so found out that's what I needed to do. Works now.

 

[DCBassman]

what device are we using for time machine? I never gave wireless or a multi mac back up a thought.
i know  made a time capsule while i was tech'n last decade or so, and might consider that.
i ask because i am now these 2 hours designing a graphic in CS4 and will save the file of art and designs on a thumb drive, then place those on 3 "early intel" macs as perhaps a machine can do this instead.

I'm using an A1355 Airport Time Capsule with a 1.5TB drive retrofitted. The initial backup, which totalled 141GB, took about seven hours, unsurprising over wifi.

 

[DominikHoffmann]

I am trying to install Sonoma on a MacBook5,1. I had not even remembered that there was an aluminum MacBook once, at least long before the ones with the butterfly keys. I did get Ventura going with OCLP.

I finally got it to work. See my other threads in this forum for how…

 

[MBAir2010]

took me over a month to figure out that iTunes 11 woks with my friend Mt Lion (who is sooooo early intel-ness)
and my home pod mini speaker! yippie!
now if QuickTime or VLC can airplay to those 2 mini speaks
i will box up the boring mac mini M1, or carefully insert that into a swamp.

for me this is huge! and can forget about getting another speaker system since these are greeeeat!

 

[eyoungren]

Fooling around again…

Today's escapades were with the 2006 Snow Leopard Mac Mini and the 2011 MacBook Air (High Sierra).

I'll start with the Mini.

First off, this is the 2TB Fantom Drives RAID Dock.



It has Firewire 400/800m USB and eSATA. The Mini is FW400, so I swapped my FW400 and 800 cables and downgraded the dock to FW400. That's okay for the following reason. The WD Red drives inside were purchased in 2015 or so I think. Only a month old when I got them. I have moved everything that used to be on here to my Synology NAS because I no longer trust these drives. It keeps flashing a red light on the front. So, I'm giving the Mini (which is used as my download server) an additional 2TB to share to the network. Nothing going on this drive is important, so if it finally fails - who cares? And I don't need speed in this use case.

I did reformat it though, after I took this pic:



We'll see if the red light comes back. If it stays off, then fine and great. But for now it really doesn't matter. I will eventually drop new drives in here but I want these to totally bomb before I decide they are no longer useful.

Here's the Mini the dock is attached to. That's my 2008 MBA running Sonoma to the right of it.



Now, the 2011 MBA.

I got my second dock today, the CORRECT Belkin with the FW800 port.



It's sitting on top of the dock for the work M2 MBP (which is behind both docks, and the 2015 MBP behind the M2).

And, I got exactly what I was looking for…

Here is my 2006 SL only 17" MBP in Target Disk Mode.



The dock, being connected to the 2011 MBA, is displaying the MBP's drive on the desktop…



So, rather than a really expensive FW to TB adapter, I've got a dock that does the same thing but also has additional ports.

Now, this 2011 MBA can fully function as a go between/maintenance Mac for me.

 

[eyoungren]

A few months back I decided to take the work issued 2015 MBP off charger and just left the battery run down. The idea was to avoid what happened a couple years back where the battery swelled. I am always running this Mac (and the M2) in clamshell mode so they are both always on charger. With the M2 Mac it's not necessary to do much as it will restrict the charging, but the '15 MBP is running High Sierra so I have to use a third party utility for that.

That's Charge Limiter and I have it set to 77%. This screen shot shows a bit higher, but there's a bit of slop so its kind of a moving target. In any case Charge Limiter did kick in. I didn't want to put this Mac back on charger until I had found something to limit the charge.




Now, we're good.

 

[eyoungren]

Semi-officially it was said 48GB was the max…



I think I need to order another 16GB module… 🤔

 

[MBAir2010]

A few months back I decided to take the work issued 2015 MBP off charger and just left the battery run down. The idea was to avoid what happened a couple years back where the battery swelled.

Thanks of this post!

my macbook pro from 2012 (pre-Cretceous era) is acting weird when in battery, and that might be the problem.
lucky i have a 3 prong screwdriver now but not the stamina or aptitude to repair or investigate the problem.
therefore a nice nap will refresh MY battery and wiil look at this later today.

 

[Amethyst1]

Semi-officially it was said 48GB was the max…

If you put in a two-CPU tray and a second CPU you can treat yourself to 128 GB.

 

[eyoungren]

If you put in a two-CPU tray and a second CPU you can treat yourself to 128 GB.

I have some ridiculous notion that this Mac will stick with the CPU it has already, be upgraded to 64GB ram (actively working on that part done) and outside of increasing drive capacity and possible OS upgrades will then remain this way until it finally dies.

The idea being that I will eventually plunk down for ANOTHER MP (this one an actual 5,1) with all the upgrades I want for that Mac. Which would leave this current one to be doing some purpose I have yet to conceive.

Which is all nonsense of course, because at some point I will decide that the CPU (and it's tray) is the only thing I haven't upgraded. I will remember your post and I will rationalize to myself that a CPU and tray will cost me less than a new MP with all the upgrades I want and I'll go and do that.

Just like I agonized about the whole process of getting this Mac from a 4,1 to a 5,1, High Sierra to Mojave, metal GPUs and Mojave to Sonoma - but ultimately shamed myself into it and finally did it.

So, yeah. Thanks! That will most likely happen.

 

[theMarble]

If you put in a two-CPU tray and a second CPU you can treat yourself to 128 GB.

I would actually suggest putting in 96GB instead, so you get the bandwidth advantage of running in triple-channel vs dual-channel. Someone did actually manage to get 256GB working in macOS with 8x 32GB sticks, but I believe that required a whole bunch of manual configuration with some Hackintosh tools. Plus, I doubt that 32GB sticks of DDR3 would be cheap.

I will remember your post and I will rationalize to myself that a CPU and tray will cost me less than a new MP with all the upgrades I want and I'll go and do that.

Last time I checked, dual CPU trays for the 5,1 MP were still surprisingly expensive, as pretty much all of the ones I could find came with both CPU's and RAM, which all together cost more than getting a full dual-CPU 4,1 + new CPUs. To be fair, this was a couple of years ago, so things have probably changed, but still found it interesting.

If you can find a dual CPU tray on its own (i.e. without CPUs and/or RAM), you could have a pretty solid deal on your hands.

 

[Amethyst1]

I would actually suggest putting in 96GB instead, so you get the bandwidth advantage of running in triple-channel vs dual-channel.

Ah yes, you’re right. Six 16GB modules it is then.

 

[MBAir2010]

today im watching with early intel macs the Olympic Road race live on the now working MBP 2012
while internet'n on the MBA 2010 without a hitch, suggestion or sinning ball!
mountain lion osx of course.

 

[eyoungren]

Last time I checked, dual CPU trays for the 5,1 MP were still surprisingly expensive, as pretty much all of the ones I could find came with both CPU's and RAM, which all together cost more than getting a full dual-CPU 4,1 + new CPUs. To be fair, this was a couple of years ago, so things have probably changed, but still found it interesting.

If you can find a dual CPU tray on its own (i.e. without CPUs and/or RAM), you could have a pretty solid deal on your hands.

Well…this won't happen soon in any case. If they are still more expensive in about 4-5 years, which is realistically when I'd even think about this, then I'll probably just go with that other plan and swap drives in to a new Mac.

In this moment, I have at least staved off being a holdout on Leopard looking for workarounds to make my old Mac(s) function in the modern world for several more years.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Ah yes, you’re right. Six 16GB modules it is then.

Action Retro Sean just ran into this in his most recent 5,1 cMP Linux build vid.

 

[eyoungren]

Shedding some light on the subject (ha!). This is the third light I've tried and it's a laptop LCD light rather than a keyboard light. Works out fairly well with this stand though.



What's interesting is that if I plug it into the keyboard itself it gets power but my mouse goes offline. So I have it plugged in to the MBA behind the keyboard. It uses touch on the plug to control the bar, so I can leave it plugged in and simply turn it off.

But the second interesting thing is that drawing power is all it appears to do. I looked at USB in the System Information app and it's not listed as a device. The MBA doesn't see it at all, despite providing power.

For those who perhaps might be wondering why I need a keyboard light, well I learned typing by memorizing where keys are. I never learned it formally and each time I tried it was difficult, so I just went back to what I know. But sometimes I have to look to see where I'm at and if it's dark I assume a key is where it's not. Been making a lot of typos. This helps.

 

[Minghold]

In this moment, I have at least staved off being a holdout on Leopard looking for workarounds to make my old Mac(s) function in the modern world for several more years.

What is the newest OS your can run (if not Leopard)? IIRC, Lion is required to run Chromium-legacy....

 

[Minghold]

today im watching with early intel macs the Olympic Road race live on the now working MBP 2012
while internet'n on the MBA 2010 without a hitch, suggestion or sinning ball!
mountain lion osx of course.

View attachment 2402518

Your battery life will be noticeably better with Mavericks or El Capitan.