Best use for old Mac Pro towers?

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Level 1

7 points

Best use for old Mac Pro towers?

I have two old Mac Pro towers, A1186 and A1289.

They were used as production/editing machines for my company's photography and videography work, and were upgraded as far as they possibly could be (we even installed CPUs from Intel's Xeon lineup beyond what Apple ever sold the machines with). These ancient machines, from 2008 and 2009 if I recall correctly, were so high quality and upgraded so much that they continued performing admirably, crushing huge Photoshop, Premiere, and FCPX jobs, into 2023 or so. Sadly though, their time finally passed and they were replaced with Apple silicon Mac Studios.

As far as I'm concerned, this era of Mac Pro was the absolute pinnacle of case design:

The materials (machined aluminum, stainless steel, etc.) was top notch, and the engineering of the case allowed easy assembly, disassembly, and access to all the components for easy upgrading.

But now they're relics. Beautiful relics from a better time as far as I'm concerned, but relics nonetheless.

What should I do with them?

What is their best use? (They still run perfectly fine... that's right, an 18-year-old computer still runs perfectly... that's a testament to Apple's quality. Try that with a Dell.)

Mac Pro (2023)

Posted on Dec 8, 2025 8:37 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 8, 2025 9:12 AM in response to ChrisConti

2009 and later can be used as a File Server and/or Time Machine Network Backup Server for a network. Setup requires they be running MacOS 10.13 High Sierra or higher.

The 2008 model is limited to 10.11 El Capitan max, so it is far less useful.

You can connect to your network using one of the two built-in Ethernet ports, or when connected to Switches that understand Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) the Two built-in ports can be combined into one faster logical link. Add-in PCIe cards for 10G ethernet (which also support 5G Ethernet and 2.5G Ethernet)are available.

Rotating magnetic drives are not substantially slowed by using USB-2 interfaces.

Hobbyists have hacked firmware to run the 2012 firmware on the 2009 model. Turing it into a Mac Pro 5,1 indistinguishable from the 2012 model. With the addition of a Metal-compatible graphics card, they can run MacOS 10.14 Mojave.

Hobbyists have hacked the boot loader software to push these model beyond their Apple-supported MacOS limits.

Since either of those modifications might harm your computer or your person, we are not allowed to provide explicit details here.

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Answer 2

Dec 8, 2025 9:08 AM in response to ChrisConti

If Drive SPEED is what you seek, there are Solid State Drives SATA SSD drives you could install in a Mac Pro 5,1 silver tower drive bay for comparable amounts of money that can attain nominal 550 M Bytes/sec speeds, about 10 times faster than the fastest Rotating Magnetic drives.

Next higher is a simple x4 PCIe card (under US$30 for the empty card) that could provide nominal 1500 M Bytes/sec in your Mac Pro 5,1 in a PCIe2 x4 slot. Installation is slightly more complex, because you must apply a heat transfer pad to the SSD stick and bolt on a heatsink (included in the kits).

Somewhat more complex and far more expensive are PCIe card with x8 or x16 capability. The Mac Pro does not support ‘bifurcation’ (i.e., writing to each x4 of an x8 slot separately) so a complex full-width drive controller chip on the card is required. This makes x8 cards far more expensive than x4 cards, and x16 cards more expensive still. But possibly twice as fast or more.

The Sabrent NVME PCIe card sold as ”x16/x8/x4” has a physical x16 connector, fits in the wide slots on an older Intel Mac Pro, but is only electrically an x4 card.

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Answer 3

ChrisConti Author

Level 1

7 points

Dec 8, 2025 9:41 AM in response to D.I. Johnson

D.I.,

That's hilarious... because I had actually thought of using them as legs for a coffee table. I would put glass on top though, rather than wood. 😝

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Answer 4

ChrisConti Author

Level 1

7 points

Dec 8, 2025 9:40 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Grant,

Thank you very much for the detailed ideas!

Of your thoughts, the dedicated file server is the most attractive, as I run movies to my living room TV, music, etc., from local hard drives (and I don't use Time Machine as my photography and videography work requires a burlier data backup solution).

It's fascinating that people have gotten the 2012 firmware to work on the '09 machines. Maybe I'll explore that (and it can't hurt anything, because otherwise this machine is a paper weight!).

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Answer 5

Dec 8, 2025 8:46 AM in response to ChrisConti

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Answer 6

Dec 8, 2025 10:23 AM in response to ChrisConti

Here ya go! 😁

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