I usually take a 2.5" external HDD from WD with me when traveling for work. The disk stays in my hotel room and every evening a TimeMachine backup is performed.
When I recently held the Samsung T5 external SSD of a friend in my hands I just realized how much lighter they are. It then also struck me that there could be a speed increase, when using an SSD as a TimeMachine backup.
This would of course not be my only backup (. This is just a convenience one, when on the go and potentially rushed.
Did anyone switch from HDD to SSD and could report whether the speed of SSDs is actually increasing the TM backup speed or is there another bottleneck (FileVault or alike)?
I use Samsung 2TB T5s to clone my 1TB MacBook Pro SSD (about 60% full), and a separate T5 for Time Machine. Carbon Copy Cloner for the clone operation. A weekly clone update takes about 10 minutes. If I do a weekly (instead of daily) Time Machine, it takes about 45-60 minutes. Not sure why there is such a difference in time since, in theory, the incremental data going into the weekly clone should be more than the incremental data going into Time Machine.
Nowadays, instead of weekly jobs, I just plug both T5s into the laptop in the morning and let them do their thing without attention.
I do CCC backups to 8Tb HDD externals 2-3 times/month and it typically takes around 35 minutes to execute the backup most times. (I ticked the Advanced check-box to find/replace corrupted files once a month, which results in that one backup taking a good six hours to complete overnight.)
Two sites that should be on any Mac power user’s “Daily Read” list:
Michael Tsai’s Blog is like a better version of DaringFireball’s “Linked List” posts. “Better” in that he posts more frequently and updates articles several times as new information comes out. His link post here pointed to the primary site:
I use an older SSD via Thunderbolt 1 with CCC for a backup. Significantly faster than the spinning drives I also use with CCC. Time Machine has always been slow for me regardless of destination used.
I like having the clone on a SSD since it provides a bootable fast drive in the event of a failure.