What have you done/plan to do with retired hackintosh hardware?

[pastrychef]

What specs did you end up getting on your mac studio?

I got the M1 Max model with 64GB RAM and 2TB SSD.

 

[Middleman]

So I have just started the process of building a TrueNAS drive today.

I decided to use my old Gigabyte Z170N-WiFi motherboard as the donor for the new drive. It’s being paired with a Jonsbo N1 I’d bought online and some spare drives left from my older NAS setup.

So far I’ve only added the motherboard and main drives including an Intel 256GB NVMe SSD as cache. I don’t have it yet but the PSU is expected to go in tomorrow. It will be a SFX (<150mm) based PSU because of the size.

 

[Robbish]

I'm currently working on my old P5Q Deluxe which was my first ever Hackintosh build that used a Snow Leopard CD and an iBoot CD for the install (ahh.. those were the days..)

It later became a great Pf Sense Box (a big ar$e box) for about a year, back when I was using it with an old ADSL modem (pre-fibre internet days for me then). It gave me a stable net connection over my ISP supplied router of the time but I think it messed with my iCloud when using my iPad (I think I was supposed to configure Bonjour ? but didn't bother !)

It was also a failed unRaid server experiment a few years back where I followed some YouTube guides and then sort of bricked the post installation whilst trying to figure out file shares (I never did get it working properly ).

It was then dormant for a few years until Lockdown, when I put Ubuntu Server on it and messed with it for few months using my Ubuntu mini pc as a client as my 2nd Hackintosh motherboard died at that time.

It lay dormant again until a few days ago when I started a fresh install of Ubuntu Server 22.04. It's got 4 old used HDD's inside, their all 500GB each. 3 are set up as Raid5 and the 4th HDD is used as the boot drive. I'm going to put several Docker apps on it and see what it can do..

 

[Middleman]

@Robbish,
Yes I remember the P5Q as I had that too! And yes that was my first hackintosh also along with Snow Leopard.

 

[etorix]

So far I’ve only added the motherboard and main drives including an Intel 256GB NVMe SSD as cache.

Further discussion would best take place on the TrueNAS forum, but please note that it is advised to bump RAM to 64 GB or more before even considering a L2ARC ("cache"). Using a L2ARC with low RAM (by ZFS standards…) will actually degrade performance.

 

[pastrychef]

The last time I tried ZFS, I found it needlessly complex and resource hungry, at least for home use.

 

[pastrychef]

We have been hit with extremely frigid temps where I live and I decided to dig out an old system and repurpose it... With Rasperry Pi prices through the roof right now, I decided to use an old i7-7700T based system to run a bunch of services. The 7700T uses a bit more power than a Pi, but it's still very efficient and if we factor in power-per-watt, it may even be better.



What I want to run:
qBittorrent
SABnzbd
Radarr
Sonarr
AriaNG
A few Dynamic DNS updaters
Pi-Hole
A remote File Browser
and maybe NextCloud

My plan was to run all of these in Dockers and manage them through Portainer in macOS (my OS of choice by far). After getting macOS, Docker, and Portainer installed and running, the first thing I installed was SABnzbd. While it worked, the download speed was extremely slow, approx 8-12Mb/s. When I run SABnzbd natively in macOS I get over ~100Mb/s downloads.

After a bit of searching for a fix and/or cause to the problem, I found the following:

Docker networking tutorial for MacOS: How to reach gigabit

Since our server runs on a Docker container and we wanted to ensure the network was not a bottleneck, we created this Docker networking tutorial for MacOS.

blog.codavel.com

Moral of the story: Don't bother with Docker in macOS if your containers need decent bandwidth...

 

[Moon-Wainwright]

I'm hoping to repurpose mine. I am trying to figure out how to make my GA-777X-UD5H I7 Hackintosh into a multiple external disk drive so I can get a Mac Studio. I have 4 HDs, 2 SSD's and and NVME on a PCIE card loaded and I would love to just be able to leave them in place and access them as separate drives via USB 3.2. (Would have to add a Sonnet Card). But I can't find info about Target mode working in such a manner.

 

[pastrychef]

I'm hoping to repurpose mine. I am trying to figure out how to make my GA-777X-UD5H I7 Hackintosh into a multiple external disk drive so I can get a Mac Studio. I have 4 HDs, 2 SSD's and and NVME on a PCIE card loaded and I would love to just be able to leave them in place and access them as separate drives via USB 3.2. (Would have to add a Sonnet Card). But I can't find info about Target mode working in such a manner.

I've never heard of Target Disk Mode working on hackintoshes.

The easiest thing is probably to share the drives over Ethernet. Just enable file sharing in System Preferences > Sharing.

 

[Moon-Wainwright]

I've never heard of Target Disk Mode working on hackintoshes.

The easiest thing is probably to share the drives over Ethernet. Just enable file sharing in System Preferences > Sharing.

That does appear to be the easiest way forward. Have you heard of file sharing working via Sonnet Technologies Allegro USB-C PCI Express 3.0 Card? The other option would be adding a 10Gb Ethernet card.