ssd drives

hjklt Said:

"ssd drives: what's the best ssd external drive to use with time machine"

-------

Using SSDs for Backups:

A SSD (Solid State Drive) runs on a faster DTR (Data Transfer Rate) compared to that of an HDD (Hard Disk Drive) - so get one that is 1.5 (one-and-a-half) size the storage capacity as your internal hard drive. The first backup will take a while - after that things will go quicker. Consider using a laptop cooler upon the first backup.

I don't use an SSD for Time Machine. Time Machine is, for me, not intrusive enough in its working to demand the speed of an SSD. Plus archival quality rotational drive may be more reliable over time.

I use Mercury Elite Pro enclosures, each with a 3.5-inch WD "Black" 7200rpm, 6GB/sec roto-drive.

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ME3NH7T00/

Zero issues.

The place for the SSD in an external enclosure is when you realize a mechanical drive in a 21.5-inch iMac is terribly slow. You can clone your internal drive to an external SSD, use the external as your boot volume, and see a significant increase is booting and app loading times.

There really is no reason to use an SSD for a Time Machine backup as the backups (with the exception of the first backup) normally only take few minutes as they are only backups of new or changed files.