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Apple Computing Products:
macOS - Notebook Hardware
Will an SSD drive last when used as a time machine?
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<blockquote data-quote="Randy B. Singer" data-source="post: 1928084" data-attributes="member: 190607"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>(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.)</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>[URL unfurl="true"]https://tidbits.com/2020/04/27/six-lessons-learned-from-dealing-with-an-imacs-dead-ssd/[/URL]</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Randy B. Singer, post: 1928084, member: 190607"] 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. 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. [URL unfurl="true"]https://tidbits.com/2020/04/27/six-lessons-learned-from-dealing-with-an-imacs-dead-ssd/[/URL] [/QUOTE]
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Will an SSD drive last when used as a time machine?
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