Using HDD Disks for Long Term Storage Get Bare 2.5 and Put Into My Own Enclosures or Buy Them in an Enclosure

If you are asking about Time Machine backup disks, the singular advantage of SSDs is write / read speed, but is utterly irrelevant with Time Machine.

There is nothing wrong with using spinning hard disk drives for Time Machine. There is nothing wrong with SSDs either. If there is any advantage to hard disk drives, it's their lower cost. Multiple redundant backups are advantageous.

Anything can fail at any time for any reason, or for no reason at all. When hard disk drives suffer from age-related failure, they usually become intolerably slow before they fail altogether. SSDs tend to fail catastrophically, with no warning.

All my Time Machine backup drives are conventional hard disk drives. Some have been in continuous use for well over a decade, whereas one or two failed within their one year warranty period. I had one SSD that lasted about ten years and then it suddenly stopped working. It had a five year warranty. Another one didn't work out of the box. None of my other SSDs have failed, ever. They are all OWC premium products and were commensurately expensive.

I have read about SSD drives not being good for long term storage or backups because they lose data if they are not powered on for long periods of time.

That is simply untrue. Flash memory does not require power.

sccfromsocal wrote:

I have read about SSD drives not being good for long term storage or backups because they lose data if they are not powered on for long periods of time.

Don't believe what you read on the internet.

For offsite backups or general backups, I prefer the smaller form factor of the 2.5 inch ones, they are smaller, easier to carry, and store, take up less space.

And they are much less reliable than 3.5" drives. I've never had a 3.5" drive die. I've had multiple 2.5" drives die.

Am I better to get bare hard drives and use my own enclosures, or swap them, or get one in an enclosure already?

There is no general answer here. Evaluate each product by its own features. I strongly recommend looking first at products available from OWC and directly from Apple. Those are the highest-quality products and the most likely to work well with your Mac.

3.5" drives certainly fail - you only need to look at https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2022/ for metrics.

That said, 2.5" vs. 3.5" adds a dimension - 2.5" tend to be lower capacity, and lower performance, but they may be better from a shock rating (considering that they're predominant in laptops that are carried around vs. desktop that generally sit on/under a desk).

But then, SSDs fail, too: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-edition-2022-drive-stats-review/

Ultimately:

Any drive can fail.

Any drive (2.5", 3.5", SSD) will meet (or exceed) the performance metrics for Time Machine backups

Durability is best achieved via multiple copies (i.e a mirror RAID), regardless of the drive media.

Buy vs. build is largely a personal opinion, based on your personal budget, technical prowess, and time.

The majority of my Time Machine backup drives were pulled from discarded, virus-infested Windows laptops. I put them in cheap $10 USB enclosures that lack any shock absorption. There are a variety of WD, Seagate, and possibly Toshiba. The one or two failures I have had were new drives, replaced under warranty. I know one was a Seagate, not sure about the other. Names don't really mean anything any more. Hitachi / HGST used to enjoy a better reputation than others but WD bought them years ago.

Perhaps the Windows PC laptop drives are like rescue dogs. Just happy to be alive.

sccfromsocal wrote:

I am not sure if I was clear enough, but the drives I am talking about here in this thread are for my general documents, like photos and videos, not time machine backups. I have separate drives for time machine backups. They will all be used externally, and not as internal drives on my mac.

You should have led with that. All of my advice was based on using Time Machine. If these are manual archives, you should be using fast SSDs. Time Machine is autonomous. It runs in the background and overnight. If you are waiting for it, you don’t want to wait. Get an SSD. A fast hard drive is good too, but that probably excludes old ones. You would be looking for a 3.5” 6 gbps 7200 rpm or greater drive. Such drives are relatively hard to find. Most modern drives you’ll find these days, especially the big ones, are horribly slow - many times slower than they were a few years ago. Protocol speed and enclosure speeds mean nothing. They run at USB 2.0 speed.

I've had piles upon piles of 3.5" HDs die, I can give you brands and models if you like.

There were certain models that, sadly, you could count on dying relatively quickly, especially those rated for "home" rather than server use.

People ask which vendor is the best, but honestly I've had drives by all the big manufacturers go south, including a Samsung SSD that had a 12 month warranty and stopped responding in month thirteen.

I also had an OWC SSD die, but at least it died under warranty and underlined the importance of having a good backup.

Dogcow-Moof wrote:

I've had piles upon piles of 3.5" HDs die

I'm not saying they won't or can't die. I'm just saying that 2.5" drives are more likely to die more quickly. I think I have about a dozen 3.5" dives and never had one die. I have about 6 remaining 2.5" drives, but I've had at least 3 die over the past 20 years.

I also had an OWC SSD die, but at least it died under warranty and underlined the importance of having a good backup.

I have no reason to assume that OWC would be any more or less reliable that other drives. They have their own SSD brand, but I think all their HDDs are from other manufacturers. OWC is just more likely to have true Thunderbolt drives and one doesn't have to worry about being the first person to ever use a given brand with a Mac. If it is from OWC, then it should work on a Mac.

sccfromsocal wrote:

If I went with 3.5 or 2.5 inch inch drives, could I get a single or two high capacity ones, and combine all the content from all my smaller capacity drives onto them as backup?

In theory, yes. But then you go from a single point of failure to multiple points of failure. If any one disk in your set fails, you lose it all.

or am I better off having my backups be the same size as the original drives?

Actually backups should be 2-3 times as large as all of the disks being backed up. I normally recommend 3 times as large for the best experience. You can get away with 2 times as much storage as you have actually used.

The important part is that the smaller the backup drive, the more problems you will have. You can easily fix them by just erasing the backup drive and starting over with it. But for some reason, people cling to their backups with a death grip. Don't do that. If your backup drive is too small, it will flake out eventually. Don't freak out. Just erase the drive and get back to business.

Also, what file format and partition scheme should my backup drives be? and what about my original first set of drives?

You don't have any choice anymore. Time Machine backups are APFS. I strongly recommend using encryption.

I personally use APFS for everything, if possible.

As far as size of a drive, it's really up to you.

With a larger drive you have the opportunity to lose more data at once, but while the drive is operating the cost for the extra space is usually negligible up to the sweet spot in the vendor's line.

John Galt wrote:

That is simply untrue. Flash memory does not require power.

No, but bits can be lost after about 10 years. "Data Retention". I don't know that powering it up helps this, though.