On Sep 26, 2016, at 9:51 AM, Julia Brinckloe <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I have a query regarding Mac system upgrades. I am currently running Mavericks (OSX 10.9.5) on my Mac Mini, 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5, 16 GB RAM. I've been reluctant to upgrade to Yosemite or El Capitan because this works well for me (and my peripherals). I know upgrades use more memory. Not sure about support for older peripherals. Is there any real advantage to upgrading--enough to override "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"..? Performance improved on my Mini of similar spec (2011) updating to Yosemite then El Cap. I’m looking at upgrading it to Sierra, in fact. There were a number of nice features with the last three updates, plus you’re going to be missing security updates, soon. More to the point, unless you’ve got Yosemite or El Cap installers cashed somewhere, you can only update to Mac OS Sierra now, because that’s what you can get form the App store. The best performance update I ever did for my Mini was put one of these in it: https://eshop.macsales.com/Search/Search.cfm?Ntk=Primary&Ns=P_Popularity%7C1&Ne=5000&N=100369&Ntt=data+doubler , adding an SSD to it and making my own Fusion drive with it: http://www.macworld.com/article/2014011/storage-drives/how-to-make-your-own-fusion-drive.html I used a 750MB 7200 rpm drive and the 240gb SSD. My Mini boots up in 30 seconds. Not as fast as the 13 second boot time for my all-ssd 2013 MacBook Air, but WAY faster than the original. Simply replacing the internal hard drive with an SSD is a *MASSIVE* performance improvement over the glacially slow HDD’s that Apple saddled the Mini’s with. Seriously. A professor bought a bunch of 2012 minis for his lab and kept complaining about how slow they were, and swore our “Windows” (not really) network was to blame, because he was downloading 4 and 500MB NIH datasets and they were taking forever. I replaced the hard drives with SSD’s and his *network* speeds went up. because the bottle neck had been those gawdawful 5400 rpm boat anchors Apple stuck in there. -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs -- You received this message because you are a member of the iMac Group, a group for those using Apple iMacs and eMacs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To leave this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/imaclist --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "iMac Group" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
