I have a late 2013 iMac which has Thunderbolt 2 and USB 3.0 ports. I need to replace my external hard drives - Time Machine and bootable clone. What is the best approach that will yield the fastest data transfer - an external SSD tied to a USB 3.0 port? Trying to find adapters to connect a USB C SSD external to the Thunderbolt 2 port (not much luck here)?
I appreciate your input.
iMac Line (2012 and Later)
Where you will see the difference is if you use the CCC drive to boot from. Trying to chase speed doing a backup really is a fools errand as it doesn't really matter. Where you should look for speed is doing boot times, shutdown times, file and app opening and closing.
However to answer your question, if you have a Thunderbolt equipped SSD that will be the quickest read write you can get. However for doing a backup, a SSD is really kind of waste unless you intend to use it as a boot drive at some point which is the advantage of using a bootable clone.
Where you will see the difference is if you use the CCC drive to boot from. Trying to chase speed doing a backup really is a fools errand as it doesn't really matter. Where you should look for speed is doing boot times, shutdown times, file and app opening and closing.
However to answer your question, if you have a Thunderbolt equipped SSD that will be the quickest read write you can get. However for doing a backup, a SSD is really kind of waste unless you intend to use it as a boot drive at some point which is the advantage of using a bootable clone.
This combination is very fast for me:
If I use an SSD with a clone of my Mojave boot drive it'll boot in about 45-50 seconds. My internal SSD boots at about 40 seconds.
Time machine uses the reverse of what you are asking for, but it is brilliant.
It does its backups at LOW priority in the background, so as to not interfere with your important foreground work.
This means that although the many small backups do not complete quickly, nor do they require you to set aside a special time to do backups. They plod along in the background in a way that often means, when you need a recent backup, Time machine is the backup that got done (instead of put off to when there was a block of time) and it there to save you.
Another point, is to check CCC to see if it can schedule backups like SuperDuper! does. I happen to use SuperDuper! and have it scheduled to backup at 2:30 AM when I am normally sleeping. I also have it back up so that it only does anything that has changed such as I adding or remove something.
I would like to add one more: ONE TimeMachine can be risky since you are willing to explore SSD as backup drive that you might be able to afford 2nd HDD for backup.
I did experience ONE failure of 1 TimeMachine hard drive. That been said -- get a second or even third drive for multiple backups to be in the safe side.
In my case, I have one RAID-1 (dual mirror-drives) with USB interface + 1 single USB 3 HDD, as part of TimeMachines.
Agreed - and I should have been more specific that I am looking for speed on that cloned volume for when/if I need to use it as the boot volume. The other volumes can stay on a traditional hard drive. I only want the SSD for the bootable clone.
My issue is everything is on TB 3 which uses the same physical port as USB C. My TB 2 port would need an adapter - which I can't find. I was hoping someone else had the same problem.
Thanks to everyone for all your input. I do use SuperDuper and also have a trial of CCC going as SD doesn't have Catalina out of beta yet. I updated to Catalina but lost all of my TM history during the transition, otherwise it's working okay on my "old" iMac. I've toyed with a clean install of Catalina as I have some Adobe fragments here and there among other things and haven't done a clean install in quite a few releases.
Your best bet is to use USB 3.
Thank you for replying. Will I see a noticeable speed difference with using an SSD with USB 3.0 over a standard hard drive? Looking at a Samsung T5 1TB external for instance.
That looks like it would fit the bill exactly - and economically! Thank you OT. You helped me about 10 years ago on this forum. Nice to see you are still around :)
Fastest way to backup
