What type of drive for Time Machine on m1 iMac?

[DaveF]

Time Machine crushes my wife's M1 iMac. What drive should I buy to fix this?

The TM drive is a WD external drive (7200 rpm 3.5" in a case) connected by USB-C / USB3. I'm surprised it smashes the computer so much -- as bad or worse as it ever did on her ancient intel iMac. The m1 is basically unusable when TM runs: the mouse is jerky and stuttery, Spotlight takes forever to find common aps, etc.

 

[elvisimprsntr]

Most, if not all, NAS appliances support TM. Suggest purchasing an Ethernet connected NAS appliance from any one of a number of manufacturers or you can DIY your own NAS with enterprise class open source NAS software from https://www.truenas.com. That way all clients can backup to the same NAS TM share rather than using resources from another clients.

Just don't expose any NAS directly to the internet unless you want to get hit with ransomware.

 

[Phil77354]

This doesn't sound right to me, how long have you been running Time Machine since first setting it up? With the same external drive? Was this a new WD drive or have you had it for some time? And did it always have this impact, from the beginning?

The initial Time Machine setup will take some length of time and subsequent updates should be very quick. But none of the Time Machine operations should be this disruptive to the use of the iMac. If the WD drive was slow then that still shouldn't bog down the iMac. I also don't know if a problem with the cable would cause this behavior.

I would suggest starting anew with Time Machine, first use the Disc Utility program to check the WD drive and erase it and start with the drive freshly imaged. Try doing this before purchasing something new. If you don't have any objection to losing the existing backup files then this would be one thing you could do immediately to see if the drive has some issue.

Another alternative is to use a different backup program - many on these forums recommend CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) as a better and more flexible backup software. There are others available too. There is a free trial period.

Carbon Copy Cloner: macOS Backup Software - Bombich Software

bombich.com

 

[Sun Baked]

Only slowed for me when spotlight was first running on my new M1, took 3 hours for the first time on a WD external and then I only noticed it when I heard the drive chatter away from then on.

However, the first attempt on the new machine, did end up with the insane long preparing and TM backup time, stopped that one reformatted drive and let it run again.

I just switched to a Samsung 2TB SSD external, and it took 40 minutes for the first backup. And I do not notice time machine running at all now.

I never got jerky or stuttering mouse movements.

 

[DaveF]

The iMac is months old, has run TM many times. The TM backup dates back years. This particular drive is new I think, bought for the new iMac.

TM slowing the computer is an ongoing issue. Just like it is on Intel macs.

I thought maybe getting a newer SSD and/or FireWire drive would fix this. That it was a USB thing.

 

[DaveF]

Also have SuperDuper. Bootable clone and easy file recovery for insurance against different risks.

 

[KaliYoni]

The m1 is basically unusable when TM runs: the mouse is jerky and stuttery, Spotlight takes forever to find common aps, etc.

In case you haven't seen (MacInTouch is a blog I follow that used to host a savvy troubleshooting community):

https://www.macintouch.com/post/23506/m1-mac-port-problems/

 

[eRondeau]

I have a base 8GB/256GB M1 Mac Mini running Time Machine flawlessly on a 2GB M.2 NVMe USB-3.1 Gen2 (10GB/s) drive made by Orico. The drive needed a RTL firmware upgrade right out of the box but it's been doing blazing-fast Time Machine backups ever since, for over a year.

 

[DrCC]

I have an Air M1 that is pretty similar to an iMac M1.
I bought an external USB-C SATA enclosure and I put a 4TB Crucial MX500 SSD inside and I don't even feel when Time Machine is backing up. An NVMe drive in a Thunderbolt enclosure would have been faster, but it is probably overkill, a regular SATA drive over USB-C is fast enough.

 

[MacCheetah3]

The m1 is basically unusable when TM runs: the mouse is jerky and stuttery

That’s not normal. I don’t even recall such behavior when setting up a TM drive (i.e. initial backup) or when the drive had less than 25% free/available space.

As a test, I decided to pay close attention during two recent incremental backups.

View CPU activity in Activity Monitor on Mac

In Activity Monitor, view the processor activity of your Mac over time, including current and recent processor activity.

support.apple.com

According to this data, the backup daemon uses about 1/8 or ~13% of the CPU.

While the latest backup occurred, I paid close attention to the cursor while quickly scrolling through some Web pages. No cursor jitter.

My TM is a 5400 RPM HDD in a USB3 enclosure with the encryption option enabled (i.e. formatted APFS (Case-sensitive, Encrypted)).

====================

So, you should view CPU usage as the stuttering happens — of course, screenshots of that would help us continue assisting you.

 

[DaveF]

Thanks. But it’s pretty unlikely I’ll get screenshots of activity monitor. It’s my wife’s computer, I never use it, and tends to happen during the workday.

I’ve always found TM to run slow and even bog down iMacs over the past ten years of Time Machine on four or so different computers now.

I’m going to look for a new SSD USB-C drive to hopefully ameliorate the problem.

 

[HDFan]

Most, if not all, NAS appliances support TM.

They may support it, but the real question is it useable. With a backup size of 2-4 TB on both QNAP and Synology the backups are glacially slow even via thunderbolt or 10GbE. When you finally get them populated and working they then get corrupt and you have to start over again. Never got TM to work reliably on a NAS after multiple tries.

Have had success on directly attached disks. But having experienced multiple hard disk corruptions making TM fail - requiring a disk wipe - I have multiple TM backups and TM is only one of my 3-2-1 backups.

Make sure your 3-2-1 backup strategy has at most 1 TM backup.