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Upgrade Mid 2010 Mac Pro to Yosemite?
I have a Mid-2010 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Mac Pro upon which I do all of my video post. I’m currently running 10.8.5 Mountain Lion, but the Adobe Cloud now says that I need to be running 10.10 Yosemite from now on. On a Mac of this age, I always worry about upgrading system software to the latest-greatest because of hardware not being able to keep up with a newer OS. (Not to mention the myriad of applications new OS software “kills” upon installation.)
I use all of the Adobe Cloud products, but also use Avid MC and FCP 7 for older projects, as well as older versions of DVD Studio Pro and Compressor, Toast Titanium, and many other older software tools.
Does anybody know if my Mac Pro will actually work properly with Yosemite, as well as any ideas of software products OS 10.10 will terminate upon install?
Many thanks to all!
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7 Replies
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Tough answer is that while I can say that I have mac pros older than that running Yosemite fine, if some of your older software has problems we can’t really help you. FCP7 works, but I rarely use that now. I have no idea about Avid or the version of Toast you’re using.
If you’re really worried about it, clone your system drive before upgrading.
John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.
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Good advice all around John. I have Time Machine backups, so I can revert back if necessary. It is good to hear that your older Macs work fine with Yosemite. Thanks for the advice.
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I have both an Early-2008 Mac Pro 8-core and a Mid-2010 Mac Pro 12 Core running Yosemite just fine. On the 2010 Mac Pro I also kept Snow Leopard on a drive for using older programs like DVD Studio Pro although that “mostly” works on Yosemite but does have a few quirks. I’ve read that FCP 7 is hit-n-miss on Yosemite with most people recommend that you NOT upgrade if you still need FCP 7 while other claim it works fine for them (not very reassuring).
What I did was purchase an OWC Mercury Accelsior_E2 480 GB SSD (which is scary fast!). This mounts in a PCIe slot so it doesn’t take up a drive bay. I installed Yosemite on that and kept my old Snow Leopard drive in a bay. I can now hold the Option key down while booting and go back to Snow Leopard anytime I need to. The Mercury Accelsior_E2 SSD put new life into this old Mac Pro. I measured 582 MB/s Read and 650 MB/s Write on the Blackmagic Speed Test which is slightly faster than the SSD I put in my Mid-2012 MacBook Pro.
I also upgraded to USB 3.0 with this Inateck 4 Ports PCI-E to USB 3.0 Expansion Card for Mac. USB 3.0 also makes a big difference in speed when connecting external drives. I didn’t need any drivers. Yosemite just works with it.
So the 4 PCIe slots in my 2010 Mac Pro contain (from top to bottom):
(4) Apple RAID Card
(3) Inateck 4 Port USB 3.0 card
(2) OWC Mercury_Accelsior_E2 SSD
(1) AMD Radeon HD 7950Like I said, these upgrades really gave my 2010 Mac Pro new life and Yosemite is running great on it.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
You can’t really restore the old OS from a Time Machine backup, if you have installed a newer OS version. So it’s solid advice to clone the drive.
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John, Sorry for the tardy response to your advice. Really great information, and I’m definitely going to look into adding the PCI card drive to my system. Sounds like that will work really well with my current projects and working with 2K – 6K stuff down the road, too. thanks for all of the insights! Peter
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Thanks for the advice…yeah, I really didn’t know the “why’s” and “wherefores” of all this. Really appreciate your help on this. Peter
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