Hardware Upgrades
iMac Pro Upgrade
My 2017 iMac Pro served me well for seven years. It remained sufficient for office tasks and basic development, but after upgrading to Windows 11 25H2, performance started to decline. I had already purchased a new workstation this year (i7 Ultra w/ RTX 5080) yet still needed a long-term plan to replace the iMac Pro.
The original model was the smallest configuration (8-core, 32 GB RAM) and still cost over €5,000. The top configuration exceeded €20,000 in 2018. After months of checking refurbished listings, I finally found a top-tier iMac Pro in excellent condition for less than 10% of its original price. With 18 Intel Xeon Cores, plenty of RAM and the AMD Vega64X, I decided to buy immediately.
The unit arrived in better condition than my own machine, which had been running roughly 14 hours per day since 2018. I installed a new RGB strip, detached the stand, and swapped the systems on the VESA mount.
After installing Windows via Boot Camp, I reviewed the SSD’s SMART data. Although the iMac Pro’s T2 chip shields system internals, SMART values still reveal power-on hours, effectively indicating the device’s true age.
To my surprise, the system had only about two months of total usage and around 200 boot cycles—essentially factory-new. I expect to use it until around 2030 for office tasks, light coding, and as a network entry point.
I rarely hit limits with 32 GB RAM, but with 128 GB available, I set up a RAM disk for high-frequency temporary writes. This reduces SSD degradation and also mirrors a common best practice from Linux systems.
NAS Storage Upgrade
My QNAP TS-431XeU NAS originally used four 500 GB SSDs in RAID10. Due to overhead from snapshots and system reserves, usable capacity was only around 700 GB. By year-end, nearly 400 GB was consumed. Since I run full backups every two months, scalability was becoming an issue.
I decided to replaced two SSDs with two 8 TB HDDs and change the overall setting.
I selected Seagate IronWolf Pro drives. The remaining SSDs now serve as a read/write cache, significantly improving responsiveness by handling most operations at SSD speeds and syncing to HDDs when idle.
Rearranging the NAS required temporarily buffering backup data. With over one million folders and data going back to 2010 with tremendous amounts of small files, even rsync over SSH was slow and unsuitable for a long uninterrupted run.
To solve this, I wrote two Bash scripts executed via WSL2—one for pulling data from the NAS and one for sending it back. They:
- Process directories sequentially
- Write checkpoint entries for reliable restarts
- Avoid heavy upfront filesystem caching
- Recover cleanly after connection drops or reboots
The scripts are available on GitHub:
- https://github.com/PhilippElhaus/Config/blob/main/sync_nas2pc.sh
- https://github.com/PhilippElhaus/Config/blob/main/sync_pc2nas.sh
Edit the variables, set up SSH keys, and they’re ready to use.