Will an SSD drive last when used as a time machine?

[Lbrewer_42]

It's been a number of years ago I read that Apple got rid of the <Secure Empty Trash> Option b/c an SSD cannot take as many read/writes without failure that a typical spinner drive can.

Has this been fixed? Anyone have a suggestion FROM EXPERIENCE:
1. For a durable SSD if they now exist?
2. A good spinner HD if the SSD still cannot handle the task.

I typically have used my macs for 15 years+ (if it ain't broke...don't fix it!) and want the most reliable.

I want the drive to velcro onto my Macbook Air 2017.

Thanks for replies

 

[MacInWin]

It's been a number of years ago I read that Apple got rid of the <Secure Empty Trash> Option b/c an SSD cannot take as many read/writes without failure that a typical spinner drive can.

Has this been fixed? Anyone have a suggestion FROM EXPERIENCE:
1. For a durable SSD if they now exist?
2. A good spinner HD if the SSD still cannot handle the task.

I typically have used my macs for 15 years+ (if it ain't broke...don't fix it!) and want the most reliable.

I want the drive to velcro onto my Macbook Air 2017.

Thanks for replies

Welcome to the forum.

I don't know that the reason for the elimination of Secure Empty Trash was due to SSDs not being able to handle it. It's more that an SSD, once erased, is virtually impossible to recover in any case. So Secure Empty was no longer needed.

Getting to your questions:

Has it been fixed? No, nothing to fix. It's how the world works. SSDs have real life limitations on the number of reads/writes they can handle. But that number is very, very large and for most users, not really an issue. The other hardware in the drive enclosure is more likely to fail than the SSD itself. Right now I have a mix of spinners and SSDs attached to my MBP and they all work well.

Durable SSD? Sure, lots of them Crucial has them, OWC has them, Samsung has them. They also all make SSDs that are not as durable, so you have to look at the particular drive details to see what is the internal construction, unless you assemble your own. Reliability and life expectancy is pretty good, if you don't go cheap or over fill an SSD. In fact, there are some reports that SSDs actually last longer, properly handled, than spinners. I use spinners for backups mostly because they are cheaper. I'm not concerned about speed with a backup because it's just a backup, after all. Using an SSD for a backup is a bit like going to the market in a Ferrari. No need. Spinners in general take more power than SSDs, which may be a consideration for you if you plan to power the backup from the MBA on battery.

Good spinners is a different question. "Good" is relative. Different folks have different opinions on various brands, based on their own experience with them. Again, it's a backup, so it doesn't get a ton of activity, normally. Small enough to velcro to your MBA adds to the heat issue that small drives can have, which, in turn, reduces life expectancy. That goes for both SSD and spinners.

 

[Lbrewer_42]

Thank you very much for the exact kind of answer I was hoping for. If you are not a teacher, you should have been! BTW former teacher!

 

[Randy B. Singer]

...Anyone have a suggestion FROM EXPERIENCE:
1. For a durable SSD if they now exist?

It depends on what you mean by "durable." On the average, SSD's are only as reliable as rotating disk hard drives. (I can give you a lot of citations to studies that show this.) There are SSD's that are quite a bit more reliable than other SSD's, but they tend to be many times more expensive than your typical consumer class SSD. For instance, you can get a reasonable internal 1TB SSD from Samsung for about $100 right now. It will be quite fast, but because it has no provisions for oversampling whatsoever (to save money and keep the price down), it's lifespan may be surprisingly short compared to expectations. On the other hand, you can purchase an equivalent 1TB SSD from Intel, and it will be blazingly fast, and it will last longer than your computer will, but it will be over $400. Everything is a trade off of price and features and thus performance and longevity.

(Note that consumer SSD's are evolving to be cheaper, and both slower and less reliable. SSD's are leaving out oversampling, DRAM, and are using cheaper types of solid state memory. Currently Crucial is selling a dirt cheap external SSD that many users have flocked too...but very early in its lifespan it will slow down to no faster than a RDHD, and its lifespan may only be two or three years.)

There is a catch-22 with using an SSD as an external hard drive with Time Machine. I'm starting to hear more and more from folks whose external SSD has filled up, and then it malfunctioned, rather than erase the oldest backup and write the newest in its place (the latter being the way that Time Machine is supposed to work). Apparently that's because SSD's themselves aren't happy about working that way. SSD's tend to slow down precipitously as they they approach about 70% full, and after that they will hardly work at all.

The best solution to avoid that is to get an SSD for use with Time Machine that is two or three times larger than your internal hard drive. That way your external hard drive will likely never fill up too much during its expected lifespan.

There is also the problem of external SSD's overheating when overtaxed by long backup sessions. SSD's rarely have much in the way of cooling (and often none at all), and they tend to throttle back performance when they overheat.

I tend to recommend that folks put together their own external SSD's so that they get the price, features, performance and lifespan that they expect. If you do a search on this forum you will find a post from me on my recommendation for how to put together your own external SSD with a fan, and which components to get. If you can't find it, let me know.

2. A good spinner HD if the SSD still cannot handle the task.

Since recent Macs (or recent versions of the Mac OS) prefer that your Time Machine backup be formatted as APFS (Time Machine will reformat your new disk to APFS as part of the backup process), and since APFS formatting causes a rotating disk hard drive to run like a slug, it's highly advisable not to use a rotating disk hard drive as your backup drive. If you do, you may find that using it to work or recover from will be so molasses slow, that doing so might cause you to have a brain aneurism out of frustration.

Six Lessons Learned from Dealing with an iMac's Dead SSD - TidBITS

After working through the failure of his iMac’s SSD, Adam Engst shares the lessons he learned with regard to backing up, restoring, and eking out the most life from old hardware. Hint: waiting to upgrade hardware and software can make troubleshooting and recovery more difficult.

tidbits.com

 

[Lbrewer_42]

Thanks for this very informative detailed reply. Since I am not worried about upgrading from my older systems, I may just go with the spinner. Back in 2007 I got an external 1 TB for my desktop (still have and use the desktop) and its still doing well. I have rarely ever even used it to restore anything just b/c I have not needed to. It's just there to back things up.

 

[krs]

(Note that consumer SSD's are evolving to be cheaper, and both slower and less reliable. SSD's are leaving out oversampling, DRAM, and are using cheaper types of solid state memory. Currently Crucial is selling a dirt cheap external SSD that many users have flocked too...but very early in its lifespan it will slow down to no faster than a RDHD, and its lifespan may only be two or three years.)

Where does one find details about oversampling and quality of solid state memory to make an educated decision?
I found that SSD manufacturers are not that forthcoming with some of those details.
I bought a 1 TB Crucial MX500 SSD 2 1/2 years ago to replace the 500 GB spinner that came with the 2012 Mini and I'm wondering every once in a while if that SSD is going to quit on me one day without warning.

 

[MacInWin]

I'm wondering every once in a while if that SSD is going to quit on me one day without warning

It will, eventually. SSDs don't give warnings or have symptoms of impending failure like spinners. They just die, boom, done.

As for research, you go to places that have good reviews. I find Tom's Hardware to be useful:

Best SSDs 2025: From Budget SATA to Blazing-Fast NVMe

Based on our extensive tests, these are best SSDs for every need and budget.

www.tomshardware.com

Best External SSDs 2025

These are the best external SSDs and hard drives we've tested, from dozens of models on the market.

www.tomshardware.com

Also AnandTech is useful:

AnandTech | Search Results for

www.anandtech.com

And, believe it or not, I look at the reviews for devices at places like Amazon and Newegg. I read the 1-star ratings to see what people are unhappy about. That tells me more than the 5-star ratings that just gush about how fantastic the drives are. I also find it useful to just read articles that pop up with an internet search for something like "SSD life expectancy" or "SSD lifetimes."

There used to be a company that maintained a large (huge, actually) server farm for customers that provided lifetimes of drives in the real world. I don't remember the company and didn't find anything with a quick search, but it was a very useful report because it was real-world and not just some theoretical assessment. Maybe somebody will be triggered to remember who did that and post it here.

 

[DEyncourt]

Backblaze? Here is their 2022 review of nearly a quarter million hard drives which was released on January 31, 2023:

Backblaze Drive Stats for 2022

Check out the 2022 year-end Drive Stats data, and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

www.backblaze.com

although this report is exclusively hard drives.

They also issue a separate SSD report. Here is their "2022 Midyear Report" of 2,558 SSDs which was released on September 13, 2022:

The SSD Edition: 2022 Drive Stats Mid-year Review

Andy Klein's much anticipated 2022 SSD Midyear Drive Stats Report is here. Read on to see the findings.

www.backblaze.com

Some cautions:
- because of the price differences, there are still few SSDs overall. Backblaze basically has been replacing its boot drives as hard drives failures were replaced by SSDs. In fact in this report there were only THREE SSDs which were 2 TBs (out of 2,558), with the rest being 500 GBs or smaller, and 2,077 of them being around 250 GBs.

- as far as I hsve seen, there are no (or at least very few) SSDs larger than 4 TBs, and a 4 TB SSD is pricey at around $500 (or ≈12.5 cents per GB) compared to $250 for an 18 TB hard drive (or ≈1.39 cents per GB). I have taken example prices from Other World Computing.

- still, you might consider the last chart on Backblaze's SSD report. In this they compared the lifetime AFR of hard drives to that of SSD. While they seemed to have run somewhat parallel over the first 4 years (with an offset of ~0.8% in favor of SSDs), in year 5 the offset jumped up to 2.6% because of the much greater number of failures for hard drives compared to SSDs.

 

[Randy B. Singer]

Where does one find details about oversampling and quality of solid state memory to make an educated decision?
I found that SSD manufacturers are not that forthcoming with some of those details.

Correct. You usually have to dig deep within a manufacturer's Web site to find the specs of their SSD's, and even then you may have to break down and ASK them. Ask if the SSD in question has:
- Overprovisioning (and how much)
- DRAM
- Supports Apple's implementation of TRIM
- What sort of memory it uses
- What the SSD's MTBF is

There are, of course, Web sites that help:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B27_j9NDPU3cNlj2HKcrfpJKHkOf-Oi1DbuuQva2gT4/edit#gid=0
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-recommendation-benchmark,3269.html
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2022/
http://www.anandtech.com/tag/ssd

I bought a 1 TB Crucial MX500 SSD 2 1/2 years ago to replace the 500 GB spinner that came with the 2012 Mini and I'm wondering every once in a while if that SSD is going to quit on me one day without warning.

You can monitor it's health, and get reports of impending failure using:

SSDreporter (free)
https://www.corecode.io/ssdreporter/index.html

 

[MacInWin]

Backblaze? Here is their 2022 review of nearly a quarter million hard drives which was released on January 31, 2023:

Backblaze Drive Stats for 2022

Check out the 2022 year-end Drive Stats data, and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

www.backblaze.com

although this report is exclusively hard drives.

They also issue a separate SSD report. Here is their "2022 Midyear Report" of 2,558 SSDs which was released on September 13, 2022:

The SSD Edition: 2022 Drive Stats Mid-year Review

Andy Klein's much anticipated 2022 SSD Midyear Drive Stats Report is here. Read on to see the findings.

www.backblaze.com

Some cautions:
- because of the price differences, there are still few SSDs overall. Backblaze basically has been replacing its boot drives as hard drives failures were replaced by SSDs. In fact in this report there were only THREE SSDs which were 2 TBs (out of 2,558), with the rest being 500 GBs or smaller, and 2,077 of them being around 250 GBs.

- as far as I hsve seen, there are no (or at least very few) SSDs larger than 4 TBs, and a 4 TB SSD is pricey at around $500 (or ≈12.5 cents per GB) compared to $250 for an 18 TB hard drive (or ≈1.39 cents per GB). I have taken example prices from Other World Computing.

- still, you might consider the last chart on Backblaze's SSD report. In this they compared the lifetime AFR of hard drives to that of SSD. While they seemed to have run somewhat parallel over the first 4 years (with an offset of ~0.8% in favor of SSDs), in year 5 the offset jumped up to 2.6% because of the much greater number of failures for hard drives compared to SSDs.

That the one! Thank you for posting it.