I did the dosdude Catalina patch to get Catalina running on my late 2011 MacBook Pro 13 which has the 2.4 i5 8g ram and a 500g hd. It runs absolutely perfect on Catalina, maybe better than High Sierra, and now thinking about pushing my luck and going after the patch for Big Sur... or is that looking for problems...
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Did the dosdude patch to get Catalina on my 2011 MacBook Pro, now debating Big Sur...
- Thread starter chevyboy60013
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I wouldn't try to run anything past 10.4.11 on a platter. You'll have to use the non metal patch and it can be buggy. OCLP is amazing tho.
anything past 10.04.11? I had macOS high Sierra on this MacBook Pro when I got it, and it worked great. Catalina works great on it to with the patch.
I was joking. I hate platter drives. Even on my 10.2-10.4 Macs I have SSDs. In reality I would say 10.13 is really the max one should go with a platter. SSDs are so cheap and the benefits are so great, its not worth it to me. The Unibody is easy to put one in. Give it shot, you'll love it. I assumed when you said HD that you had a platter since they shipped with 500s.
If you really want to make it scream and are not concerned about data loss, go for a Raid 0. According to the AppleDollars chart, yours is compatible. I did this to a MB 7,1 and it is phenomenal.
Replacing the HD and the optical drive with SSD's and then configuring it into a striped array. Basically doubling the R/Ws and nearing 1Gbs. By comparison a platter is probably topping out at around 125-150 and you would be getting 950ish. Its worth it if you want max speed from your boot drive. If it works fine the way it is, keep it OG. Booting later macOS was problematic after 10.12. It's doable if you enjoy tinkering.