Can I use an SSD external drive for Time Machine backups

Using a SSD for a Time Machine backup is a total waste of money. It will work, but it's akin to using a Formula 1 race car to commute 2 miles to work. Just buy yourself a good quality External Hard Disk such as a OWC Mercury Elite Pro and off you go!

Total lack of knowledge. HDD does not cut it for anything. SSDs will last more and will be more reliable than HDD. And if you need to restore your machine because, let’s say you need to delete your drive because of logical errors that won’t go away as per Apple documentation, then you will see the difference. Good choice on an SSD

Hi there!

Have you tried to erase your backup disk, then use Time Machine to select it as your backup disk again?

If the erase process fails, you might need a new backup disk.

If you need to replace your backup disk, the SanDisk Professional 2TB G-Drive ArmorATD™ - Apple should work well for you. The SanDisk external disk includes the older style USB-C to USB-A cable needed to connect the disk to your model of iMac.

Hope this helps!

Jack

andrewfromjoplin wrote:

Out of curiosity, what has your speed been like for Time Machine? I'm also contemplating getting a 2TB SSD out of sheer annoyance at how slow the backups can be.

I have been using both SSDs (various models -- WD, G-Drive, Samsung, Apricorn) and HDDs (mostly WD, several Apricorn) for Time Machine. The initial very first Time Machine backup is much faster with the SSD, maybe less than 1 hour to back up 400 GB versus 2-3 hours for the HDD. But after that, the incremental backups seem to be almost equally as fast -- I think the speed of the SSD (500-1000 MB/s) over the HDD (100-200 MB/s) doesn't really factor in because most of the time for the Time Machine incremental backups seems to go into organizing many small file copies and establishing the soft links that Time Machine uses on the backup drive. So either way the incremental backups tend to be under a minute for me.

Apples Disk Drive utility software has four APFS format options: APFS, APFS (Encrypted), APFS (Case-sensitive), and APFS (Case-sensitive, Encrypted) for formatting new SSDs.

Not yet sure of using the options at this point. Case-sensitive seems important to me.

For some reason, I previously thought the APFS data was already hardware encrypted on a Mac internal drive. I must be wrong.

From the support page "File system formats available in Disk Utility on Mac":

Choose one of the following APFS formats for Mac computers using macOS 10.13 or later.

• APFS: Uses the APFS format. Choose this option if you don’t need an encrypted or case-sensitive format.
• APFS (Encrypted): Uses the APFS format and encrypts the volume.
• APFS (Case-sensitive): Uses the APFS format and is case-sensitive to file and folder names. For example, folders named “Homework” and “HOMEWORK” are two different folders.
• APFS (Case-sensitive, Encrypted): Uses the APFS format, is case-sensitive to file and folder names, and encrypts the volume. For example, folders named “Homework” and “HOMEWORK” are two different folders.

I use a 4 TB SSD from OWC (MacSales.com) in this configuration:

and, except for the first backup, the backups take around 3 minutes for incremental backups of 1.8 TB.

I use them as it makes restoring and migrating to new Mac much faster (I do new Macs all the time). Also takes up much less desk space but everyone has their own opinion.

What Mac model and year do you have?

What system are your running?

Was the Seagate used for Time Machine or something else or both?

Will Time Machine work with the Seagate?

If you erase the Seagate and use it for Time Machine it will be converted to the APFS format and will be Read Only for everyone except Time Machine.

So your Seagate may not be worthless. Answer the questions and we may be aloe to solve your problem with it.

Yes you can, but it is kind of a waste when a decent EHD is all that is required for Time Machine.

Clone backups are actually a better use for and External SSD.

I have been using CarbonCopyCloner for years. see > https://bombich.com/

Another good one is > https://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

I just had another hard disk drive fail to boot properly after years of use. SSDs are more expensive but they should be more reliable over time. If you drop an SSD, there is little that can break inside them. The larger the SSD the better because they can use the extra space to avoid erase cycles. What software you use to do backups is a good question. Time machine that does archival backups or Superduper that performs snapshot backups.

I exclusively use 2 TB Crucial X8 SSDs for Time Machine backups on all of my recent Macs. The drives come formatted for exFAT and I reformat them as APFS. Been using these for two years without any issues at all. Fast and reliable.

Out of curiosity, what has your speed been like for Time Machine? I'm also contemplating getting a 2TB SSD out of sheer annoyance at how slow the backups can be.