Most users won’t ever have to worry about “wearing out” an SSD, using it either for Time Machine or for general use. In terms of Time Machine’s suitability for SSDs, SSD reliability has gotten a lot better as manufacturing has improved. A good rule of thumb is that your Time Machine drive should be 2-3 times the size of the hard drive or SSD drive your have in your Mac. For example, if you have a 1TB drive in your laptop and can only afford a 512GB SSD drive for Time Machine, you could fill up that Time Machine SSD pretty quickly. If you are tempted to get a smaller sized SSD because of the price, be aware that will mean fewer backups that Time Machine can store before the drive is full. And it’s unlikely that SSD performance is going to net you that much of a difference to make the still-premium price worthwhile. Time Machine backups and restores via an SSD will be faster than a regular hard drive, cumulatively, but there’s still a big difference in price between an SSD and a regular hard drive. The sort of performance specifications that might lead you get an SSD aren’t necessarily applicable to a backup system. You’re not using the Time Machine storage system as your primary boot drive. And you will have a very fast external drive, either way.īut it’s important to remember what you’re doing with a Time Machine backup: You’re backing up.

With the prices dropping on SSDs, it’s more affordable than ever to buy an external USB SSD or even splurge and get a Thunderbolt or Thunderbolt 2-based external SSD. They’re also not available in the same sort of huge capacities you can find for hard drives. SSDs are also considerably more expensive per gigabyte than hard drives, though they’ve gotten dramatically more affordable in recent years. SSDs are quieter and use less power than hard drives do. Really, upgrading your computer with an SSD is one of the more cost-effective ways to improve performance. More new computers than ever are shipping with SSDs preinstalled, and they’ve also become a popular upgrade for people looking to keep their current systems working for a bit longer. Without any moving parts, SSDs are much faster than hard drives: Faster to boot, faster to launch applications and faster to open and save files. SSDs are built using memory cells instead of a physical hard drive. How does all that wear and tear on the hard drive affect reliability, especially on SSDs?

As a result, Time Machine really works best when a hard drive is just left plugged in to the Mac it backs up continuously, throughout the day, as you make changes to your computer.

Ssd external hard drive time machine