Time Machine Bandwidth Saturation

[smirking]

I've been using SSDs to run my Time Machine backups and now that it's time for me to get an ever larger backup drive, I'm wondering if SSD speed is really necessary for Time Machine. I know that Time Machine has to do some work so it's not ever going to come close to saturating all the bandwidth available to it, but realistically how much bandwidth could it consume?

It does feel like my backups are done sooner ever since I started using an SSD to run my backups, but I paid money so of course I want to believe that was a worthwhile expense and I can't run a side by side comparison.

So is my perception correct? Is Time Machine performing significantly better on an SSD with all other things remaining equal?

 

[Weaselboy]

So is my perception correct? Is Time Machine performing significantly better with an SSD to write to all other things remaining equal?

I use a Samsung T7 SSD for TM backups and my observation is the same as yours... mush faster backups than a HDD.

I used my TM backup to setup my new 14" MBP a week ago, and the migration was MUCH faster than using a HDD TM backup as the source.

 

[Bigwaff]

So is my perception correct? Is Time Machine performing significantly better on an SSD with all other things remaining equal?

Everything performs significantly better on SSD compared to HDD ;-) It's the TM restore where you will get most benefit from SSD. I actually alternate TM backups to NAS and ext HDD. Don't care how long backups take as TM runs in background and are incremental. If ever need to restore, I accept the painful slow restore of NAS or HDD in exchange for cheap high capacity storage.