HDD vs SSD for external backup drive

[bigpoppamac31]

Okay so I'm looking to get a 1TB external backup drive. I already have an external case with USB 3.0 that fits a 2.5 inch hard drive. Does it make sense to get an SSD or is traditional HDD still the better and more reliable option?

 

[chabig]

I don't a hard drive has ever been a better and more reliable option compared to an SSD. Any SSD ought to be better in every way. Plus, APFS runs better on SSDs.

 

[chrfr]

Okay so I'm looking to get a 1TB external backup drive. I already have an external case with USB 3.0 that fits a 2.5 inch hard drive. Does it make sense to get an SSD or is traditional HDD still the better and more reliable option?

I'd get a regular hard disk. Performance is no factor in backups, and you can get much more capacity for your money than you can if you bought an SSD.

 

[AppleSmack]

Okay so I'm looking to get a 1TB external backup drive. I already have an external case with USB 3.0 that fits a 2.5 inch hard drive. Does it make sense to get an SSD or is traditional HDD still the better and more reliable option?

HDD:
Lower price per terabyte.
High lifetime write capacity.
Acceptable read and write speed for backup.

SSD:
High price per terabyte.
Lower lifetime write capacity.
Fast read and write speed.

Basically get an SSD, if you have the money to replace it more frequently and will actually benefit from the speed. The only time I can see SSD being of benefit is if you need it in a disaster as a bootable backup where time is money.

Otherwise, you just need an HDD.

 

[Fishrrman]

You can go either way.
An SSD will be faster if you keep cloned backups (as I do), and update them incrementally.
An incremental backup of my "main data" partition takes all of 5 seconds with an SSD using CarbonCopyCloner.

For a time machine backup, it probably doesn't matter (I don't use tm).

 

[Sisti00]

i start yesterday to use TM on 500gb partiton of 1 Tb ssd. It is faster but not as much as i expected: the preparation phase is slow as a usb 2.0 HDD (which i used for years); with ssd you gain some speed at the end, when TM is writing on ssd, but not so much (maybe because TM is designed for running in the background using system resources at minimum).
So the speed of daily backup (some GB) isn't so higher on ssd; it is similar to usb 3.0. but you gain a lot of SILENCE (only little coil whine from the ssd). I'm very happy for this reason