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What to do with 2nd (older) Mac Pro

J

Jigga Beef

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 11, 2009
252
23
Philadelphia, Pa
I just bought a 2012 mac Pro. Looking forward to an upgrade from my Early 2008 Mac Pro.

However, my Early 2008 Mac Pro works fine. Runs El Captain, I have PLENTY of HDDs sitting around and some extra room in my office.

I am sure I can do something useful with it just have no clue.


Any ideas are welcome.
 
I have a drobo! but its older and loud, i use it as a 3rd backup. As far as a media server goes I have a 6TB HDD in my mack pro 3rd bay that is full of my media not sure how i would use a server.
 
LorenK said:
Give it to a relative. I gave mine to my son and now he has a media server.
Click to expand...

+1 Maybe there is someone who really needs it...

Or just sell it if you don't know what to do with it..
 
Install macOS server on it and set up the following:
- time machine for all your devices
- carbon copy cloner destination for bootable backups
- caching server
- plex or media server of your choice
- got any home automation stuff?
- VPN
 
Jigga Beef said:
I am sure I can do something useful with it just have no clue.
Click to expand...
Send it to eWaste. It's "use by" date is long past.

Seriously.

Look at any alternative use, like a file server. Look at its power consumption, and its ancient disks. Figure out the price of new disks, and electricity over a year.

Compare that to the price of a commodity NAS server (or even a higher end NAS like a QNAP) and its power consumption.

The 2008 is a power pig. Unplug it.
 
I've been wondering about what to do with my MacPro3,1 too. I'm looking into creating a Plex server with it because my Drobo 5N doesn't have enough CPU capacity to handle movie files (most NAS can't?) but then running 3,1 all the time for all my family to use will be a power drain. It's running ElCap and I have tons of parts inside the aluminum box and I just don't want to throw it away yet. May be a leg warmer?:oops:
 
zoomfinder said:
I've been wondering about what to do with my MacPro3,1 too. I'm looking into creating a Plex server with it because my Drobo 5N doesn't have enough CPU capacity to handle movie files (most NAS can't?) but then running 3,1 all the time for all my family to use will be a power drain. It's running ElCap and I have tons of parts inside the aluminum box and I just don't want to throw it away yet. May be a leg warmer?:oops:
Click to expand...
Think Paris. Disconnect the power pig.
 
The 3,1 was easily the greatest Mac Pro when it came to value/performance.

Mine is sitting in the floor after upgrading to a 5,1.

It's been on craigslist for 2 weeks now. I'm ready to drop the price down yet again.

I still have the original box. It has the BT/WIFI card (BTO). 8GB of Apple FB-DIMM. It's also got an Apple Radeon 4870 (not a bad card for mild gaming). It sat for weeks at $350 without a single bite. Pretty sad, because it's still a very capable machine with a SSD.

But yeah, the power. I won't give it to my girlfriend because I'd hate to have 2 Mac towers running in the house.
 
If the poota won't be kept running 24/7 or frequent lengthy periods of time (will either be shut down or put to deep sleep when not in use), I don't think it's higher power consumption should be much of a concern, especially if it's not maxed out with high power (high RPM) hard disk drives. I gave my 3,1 with a single WD Caviar 2TB drive to my parents and they use it for browsing, online games (yep, my dad loves playing them) but it mostly sits in deep sleep most of the day. Their 2009 24" i5 iMacs' screen went dead and since it wasn't worth the cost to replace its monitor (I had gotten them a cheap Dell 21" to use as a monitor attached to the iMac video port) and the fact that the processor is really sluggish under Sierra (did the hack to install Sierra), replacing it with the 3,1 made remote troubleshooting easier with it's much faster responsiveness.
 
It's funny to hear a (3,1) called a power pig. Some 20+ years ago, I had an opportunity to bring home a complete, working DEC KI-10, just for my amusement. My wife forbade it, unfortunately. Now *that* was a power pig! I probably would have had to upgrade my home power drop with a separate line just for the KI10.

But yeah, while it's still a perfectly usable machine, if you have no real jobs for it to do, I'd say it's not worth the cost of running it.
 
It's a all relative: I have an Xserve RAID that I originally bought when I owned a commercial print shop; now THAT was a money-hungry power hog which ran 24/7 and astronomically impacted my power bill! When I sold my business and lent it to my cousin's business, he eventually gave it back because it was too expensive electricity-wise to operate it.

I still have it but only turn it on when performing periodic backups: can't beat it's fiber channel data transfer speed!
 
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