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Can You Recommend a Time Machine Drive?

Can you recommend an external SSD drive that I can simply use to backup my MacBook Pro using Time Machine? Device is 2019 MacBook Pro 16 inch, 512 GB, with Mac OS Catalina pre-installed. Many thanks.
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Alan

Comments: One Response to “Can You Recommend a Time Machine Drive?”

    4 years ago

    First, I wouldn't use an SSD for a Time Machine drive. SSDs are great as internal drives and I wouldn't use anything else at this point for that. But for a backup, all that speed is unnecessary. Almost all of the time, all that a backup drive does is get updated with new data. It isn't the back-and-forth that an internal drive does while editing video and reading and writing caches and such. Plus, the backup is running in the background and not something you need to interact with. So it doesn't make much difference to you how fast the drive is. A standard HDD will work fine and cost much less.

    So for a standard HDD, I don't have a specific recommendation. I'm using a Seagate drive now (see https://macmost.com/recommendations) but I haven't done any comparison so I can't really say how well it works compared to say a WD or other drive.

    For a 512GB drive, I wouldn't get anything less than a 1TB drive, but a 2TB or 4TB probably won't cost much more and will give you that much more space. I do like getting drives that don't need a second cable for power as it is an inconvenience and if that means backing up less it isn't worth it.

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