hackintosh

In April of 2012, I had been impatiently waiting for Apple to update the Mac Pro for a year, and the iMac for a few months.

I honestly had no reason to believe the Mac Pro was going to be updated soon. While it was a somewhat dated machine, in the world of Xeon multi-processor machines it was not that far out of date. If it received a bump before 2013, I believed it'd mostly be in the name of peripheral support. While there were many who needed to see a bump on the Mac Pro to avoid having to jump ship to Windows, I was not one of those people; I can easily run FreeBSD on Xeon multi-processor machines and get nearly all of my work done on such a machine. And given what Tim Cook said after WWDC 2012, I didn't think we'd see a new Mac Pro until late 2013, if ever.

I was fairly certain that the iMac would get a bump in late 2012 in order to remain competitive. And I needed an OS X desktop machine, for both development and day-to-day tasks. However, it was still a significant investment in hardware, which isn't easily accessorized and upgraded. I love the design of the iMac 27" and the screen is gorgeous. But if I wanted multiple internal hard drives plus SSD, I couldn't do it within the enclosure of the existing iMac and I didn't expect to be able to do it in the next iMac. There is also no way to run a discrete graphics card. While the Nvidia GTX 680MX isn't terrible, it's not ideal for my work. And given the thermal consstraints of the iMac, it's just not the right thing for me.

The Mac Mini was out of the question for my needs for reasons similar to the iMac.

That left me wanting to build a hackintosh; commodity PC parts running OS X. There's quite a bit of community support for building and running such a machine these days, at a price point much lower than Apple's machines, especially if you already have parts you can use (say my pair of 24" monitors).

I have thus far completed one machine (Build1) and am nearly done with a second (Build2). I've learned a lot in the process, which has been useful. It's certainly more work to get a hackintosh up and running than it it to just buy an Apple machine, but I got what I needed and wanted which unfortunately isn't offered by Apple today.

Diary

• May 26, 2017
  
  • My hackintosh is now running macOS Sierra.

• February 26, 2017
  
  • I finished installing the second WD RE 2TB drive. Something odd happened when populating the second drive (Data) from the first drive (Data Backups). The copy halted, and I found the Data drive reporting Current_Pending_Sector as 4 in S.M.A.R.T. I would normally expect a drive in this state to either decrement Current_Pending_Sector as it reallocates the sectors (and increment Reallocated_Sector_Ct), or decrement Current_Pending_Sector if a successful read of the sectors occurs. Since I was only writing to the drive, I suspect the LBAs in question were holding filesystem metadata.

    I wound up writing zeros to the whole drive (5 hours), then recreating the Data partition and copying again. The Current_Pending_Sector count wehnt to 0, and Reallocated_Sector_Ct remains at 0. I will keep an eye on things. This drive is used, and has 20,000 hours on it (2.28 years). The first drive (Data Backups) also has 20,000 hours on it. In both cases, that's less hours than the drive that was replaced, and the replaced drives were not enterprise drives.

• February 25, 2017
  
  • I installed one of the refurbished WD RE 2TB drives as a replacement for my original Data Backups drive. I then fixed the configuration in Carbon Copy Cloner and started a backup of Data to Data Backups.

• February 24, 2017
  
  • I bought a pair of refurbished WD RE 2TB drives from Microcenter. These will replace the 500G and 1TB drives I was using for Data and Data Backups. My existing Data volume is used for iTunes music and movie files, and was nearly full.

• November 16, 2014
  
  • I now have the WiFi/Bluetooth card from osxwifi.com installed and it works with Handoff. I had to log out of iCloud a few times on all of my devices to get Handoff working, but it's done and I like it.

    I continue to muck around with my Clover configuration. Once every couple of days, it will crash when trying to wake it up. I'm hoping that my latest configuration changes will resolve the issue, but we'll see. Some of it is probably due to the U1L BIOS on the motherboard, but there's nothing newer from Gigabyte that is UEFI.