Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me tell you why you may have
bought the wrong hard drive for Time Machine.
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to
MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about
the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
Now when you buy an external hard drive to use with Time Machine to backup your Mac
you have lots of different choices. More and more I hear people making the wrong
one. What they're buying is a solid state drive or SSD. You, of course,
want to get a good quality hard drive so a solid state drive would be considered to be a better
quality drive than an older hard disk drive. One that has a spinning disk in it. After all SSD's
have a couple of advantages over hard drives. One is that they're much faster. Another is
that they are more durable. There are no moving parts. So theoretically they should also longer.
However hard disk drives have a couple of advantages that are actually more
important when it comes to doing backups. The big one is that you can get larger storage
sizes. You can get much larger hard drives than you can solid state drives. Another big advantage
to hard drives is they're much cheaper. There is no reason to waste money when you're not going to
use the extra quality that that money brings. Let's talk about each of these differences.
First, while it is true that SSD's are faster you don't really need that speed
when it comes to backups. Backups run in the background. There is no rush to get them done.
If it takes 4 minutes to do a backup or 1 minute to do a backup it's really not
going to change things for you as you use your Mac. It is just happening behind the
scenes. So you don't really need that super fast speed. Now if you're thinking well what
if I need to restore from my Time Machine backup. But hopefully you'll never need to
do that. You should only need to restore from a Time Machine backup in an emergency. In case
that happens I wouldn't worry too much about speed. I mean your work's getting interrupted.
You're probably going to have to go and do something else while the restore happens anyway.
Now as for a solid state drive's being more durable than hard drives,
well this isn't really a factor with backups either because it is just the backup. If the
backup fails the only time that is a problem is if it fails at a the exact same time as your
internal drive. Then you have two failures at once. Of course that is extremely improbable.
Chances are if your backup drive fails it just fails on its own and you just replace
it with a new one. This can happen whether it is an SSD or a hard drive. Is it more likely
to happen with a hard drive. It's really hard to say. You're really not using a hard drive
at its full capacity when you're doing just a backup to it. It's not like the internal drive
on a machine that's constantly being read from and written to. It's being used at a much lower rate.
But if your concern is durability then what you should really be doing is going for a
second backup that's online. So you're using a service like Backblaze and saving your files
online in addition to Time Machine. Now you've got two backups. A second backup is not in the
same location as the first backup. So let's talk about price and storage. But before we
do let's talk about how much storage you need with a Time Machine drive.
In general you should look at how much stuff you're storing on your local drive and if you
have any other external drives. So maybe, say, you've got a 1 TB drive and it is half full.
You also have an external 2TB drive and that's half full. So that's 1.5TB of data right now.
In the future that's going to creep up to 2TB and over. So you want to double that number to find
the minimum size of a drive. So, for a 2TB you would double to 4TBs. Now this is minimum. So,
I wouldn't use this. I would go with several times more than that. As a matter of fact I
personally would go with a 12TB drive. But if I was to buy one today I would go even higher than
that. Remember Time Machine doesn't just store a copy of each file you have now. It stores a
history. So, a file that you deleted last week or last month its got a copy of that. A file you've
changed 17 times over the last 17 days you're going to have 17 copies. You want the backup to
last years. You want to be able to go back and fine a file that you didn't realize you deleted
last year or two years ago. So you want this thing to be several times the size if you can do that.
Now let's look at some size and prices. Here's a hard disk drive from Western Digital. A typical
one. As a matter of fact I have a very similar model to this. You could see at 12TB it's just
over $200. This is a pretty typical price for something this size. You could actually jump
up to 14TB. It's going to jump up a little bit in price but then you can go from there to 16TB
and 18TB you're still under $300 even at 18TB of storage. That's going to be able to save years of
stuff. If you're doing lots of work with images, with videos, and such you're going to have lots
of large files and you're going to be changing them and even removing them all the time and
this will allow the Time Machine backup to keep up with all that having all that extra space.
But a sweet spot does seem to be around 12TB for a little over $20.
Now let's compare that to solid state drives. So solid state drives typically come out right now
at about $200 for 2TBs. Sure they are exceptions and sometimes you can find sales. But typically
you're going to pay twice that for 4TB. So you're looking at 2TB instead of 12TB if you go with a
solid state drive. You saw I can go to 18TB for the price of a typical 4TB solid state drive. So
you definitely get a lot more storage for a regular hard drive than you do a solid state
drive. This is true whether or not you're trying to save money or get a larger drive or both. If
you really just think you need 2TB or 4TB you can save a lot of money by getting a hard drive
over a solid state drive. On the other hand if you're looking at 4TB solid state versus,
say, an 18TB hard drive then the 18TB one is going to be a much better option as a backup.
Now another factor is power. These larger drives like this typically have their own
power connection. So you're plugging into a wall socket and you're also plugging into
your computer. The solid state drives don't have that. You're just plugging right into
your computer. Just one cable which is great. But you can get that in hard drives too. These
are typically called Portable Drives. They do have size limits. Typically 4 or 5TBs is
the limit for a portable drive. They are much smaller and they just plug in with
one USB cable. But the price and size ratio are still superior to the SSD. For instance
for about $100 you can get a 5TB portable hard drive and it's going to cost you typically two
or four times that to get a Solid State drive with the same amount of storage.
So if you're asking for my advice, which a lot of people do all the time, it is to get a hard drive,
not a solid state drive, for a Time Machine backup. Get a large one! 12TBs or even a 18TBs
if you really want something that's portable, that doesn't have another power cable attached to it,
then go for one of the 5TB portable hard drives. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.