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Best external HD for Time Machine.

macrumor2018

macrumor2018

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 19, 2018
63
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My Seagate OneTouch SSD 2TB just stopped working (I've been using it with Time Machine for the last 2.5 years) and whenever I plug it into my mac, the whole finder app stops responding. Nothing in disk utility appears, either. Immediately as soon as I unplug it, everything goes back to normal, finder responds without issue and disk utility shows all my other connected disks and mac HD. Any ideas here? It's happening with 2 different macs and I've tested other cables as well.

I wish to replace my SSD, which external HD would be best for use for hourly backups with Time Machine?

Edited to add: This problem also seems to occasionally happen with another Seagate portable HDD (non-ssd) with another Mac, especially with booting and the top menu bar not showing after login. Haven’t experienced this with SanDisk or WD that I’m aware of.
 
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macrumor2018 said:
Edited to add: This problem also seems to occasionally happen with another Seagate portable HDD (non-ssd) with another Mac, especially with booting and the top menu bar not showing after login. Haven’t experienced this with SanDisk or WD that I’m aware of.
Click to expand...
Just made the above edit to my original post.

Bigwaff said:
It’s dead.

Any USB ext hard drive as you can get more capacity for less $$$ in comparison to SSD. Though slower than SSD, who cares how long backups take. Set it and forget it.
Click to expand...

A bit harder and longer to restore from backup with a non-SSD in my experience. I’m just not sure which brands people here prefer…
 
What machine? What OS? What kind of interface? USB? Thunderbolt? FireWire?
 
M1 is not my territory, to be honest, but, for mission critical backups I would only use 3.5" rotating platter drives. WD Reds that use CMR technology come to mind. And an enclosure by any reputable manufacturer that fits your budget. If the amount of data in incremental backups is not large, even USB3 interface will do.
I would also clone the contents of that 3.5" drive to another drive, which might be an SSD.
Regular use of tools that monitor drive's SMART parameters and look after directories/data, such as DiskWarrior is also recommended.

EDIT. Stay away from external drives/enclosures that employ some sort of data encryption. I think 'ready to use' products by WD, Seagate and Samsung fall into that category. Better roll your own. In that way you can always remove the drive and pop it into another enclosure, if anything goes wrong.
 
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macrumor2018 said:
A bit harder and longer to restore from backup with a non-SSD in my experience.
Click to expand...
Longer, sure.. “harder”, though?.. can you be specific about what is “harder” w/ ext HDD vs ext SSD?
 
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I have just begun to use a Samsung T7 Shield 4TB SSD for Time Machine backups for my new Mac Studio. Transfer speeds seem very fast when I did the first set up. My plan is to also have a WD My Passport Ultra 5TB connected as well, with Time Machine alternating between the two so that I have extra redundancy. I'm kind of regretting not getting two of the Samsung SSDs though, to get completely away from rotating drives.

This is my first time using an SSD for Time Machine backups, I've previously used LaCie Mobile Drives and other WD and LaCie drives (non-SSD) without issue.
 
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