Hi - Newbie/Beginner patcher here but with 30 years experience and knowledge of Macs and macOS - I have a MacPro early 2009 with an RX580 8GB and OpenCore installed on an NVMe PCI 1TB drive that is in the lower X4 slot (GPU is in bottom slot, obscuring the info printed on the backplane but I'd guess that is the x16 slot ?- it is a 4,1 flashed to 5,1 with two quad core Xeon X5570 at 2.93Ghz and 96GB 1066 Mhz RAM firmware version 144.0.0.0.0 - it is running Big Sur 11.2.3 and I have left it alone since purchase so as not to risk breaking the system (only individual app updates). It was used in video production by the previous owner.
Now- It has 2 HDDs in the bays (from older Mac Pros, with my old data on them) and the DVD slot has two 500GB SSDs arranged as one scratch apple RAID volume.
I'd like to upgrade it as far as I can go - there is also a Sonnet USB C card installed. I have Logic Pro installed on an old iMac and ideally I would like to move it from the iMac to the Mac Pro as I imagine it will run better there? And also there's the optical sound connections ! The idea being to have this as a music production tool that would last me a long time.
Anyway, first up, I do not want to risk breaking what is working so I am thinking of buying another NVMe PCI SSD, swapping the current one out and putting it somewhere safe (maybe in an enclosure?) and using OCLP to start afresh with the new NVMe, installing OCLP then whatever MacOS works best.
Additionally, for reasons of space I'd like to lose my windows desktop - so I'm thinking of somehow making this Mac Pro dual boot and am interested in the best ways to do that (install Win 11 on the scratch disk(s) ? - I don't work in video so don't really have need of them configured as they are.
I am very interested in any and all advice, so thanks in advance.
Immediate questions:-
1) what grade of NVMe to buy (or will those SSDs suffice?
2) what grade of thumb drive to buy (for the OCLP install process)
3) (see internal layout) - the X16 slot right above the GPU RHS fan - could I put the new NVMe there and have BOTH the old and the new one left in it ? any advantages? or would it restrict the GPU fan too much? - The EFI partition with current OpenCore folders is on that NVMe; would this interfere with boot?
cheers!
Andy
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