SSD as Backup Drive?

[bkshepard]

A question for the collective...

Is it okay to use an SSD drive for a backup drive? In the past, the Buck:Byte ratio made them too expensive, but that seems to be balancing out now. I also read a number of articles awhile back that seemed to suggest that SSDs weren't as reliable over long-term usage and read/write activities. That seems to also have improved. All my other drives are SSD and I'd love to get rid of the frequent read/write chatter of my current backup. I use Time Machine to do the backups. Thanks for any info or suggestions.

[Frodo]

SSD is as legit a backup resource as any since no drive lasts forever. The only thing would be whether an SSD as a backup-only drive is worth the price if it costs more than a an HD. The benefit of the SSD is its seek speed and lack of moving parts. The question is which type of drive has a longer shelf life.

HD or SSD, the benefit of either as backups is that they don't get used as much as drives used for streaming for hours a day. There's less wear and tear all around.

HDs are cheaper. SSDs are faster and use less energy. Since backing up is not necessarily a daily task in all cases, the risk of file corruption is lower on either drive. My current instinct would be to go with SSD if the price is right. Why? There's less risk of mechanical failure.

But, back up that backup!!

[bkshepard]

Hey Frodo,

Great to see you haunting these parts! I definitely backup. Time Machine does it every hour and I do major backups to Dropbox. I know the SSDs are more expensive, but if I can get rid of the frequent read/write chatter of my current HDD the price is well worth it.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

For my two (s)cents, why not both? I always have redundant backups. One of each...?

Wait! Was Frodo here? I see the post but not the hobbiteses... where is he, Precious.

[mikehalloran]

The current build of the WD Reds are extremely quiet. I put a 12TB into an old pancake Time Capsule a couple days ago and I can barely hear it with my ear 6” away from the box. It also runs much cooler than the WD Green I pulled out of there—and that was a much cooler running HDD than the original Seagate I pulled out of there in 2011. $349 at Amazon.

There’s nothing wrong with using an SSD for Time Machine now that you can get 4TB for around $500. There’s no advantage to it either unless you have to do a complete restore — and then there is. If I’m replacing a system drive a Mac with an AHCI blade, I use TM to back it up to an SSD on my bench then restore using that backup after putting in the NVMe blade and installing the OS from a USB stick — much faster and a lot less hassle than cloning. Did that with a 2014 Mini just yesterday.

The thing is that, if you need to do a complete restore — say, you upgraded to Catalina before you were ready, it takes a few minutes using APFS Snapshots to do a complete Restore. SSD or HDD doesn’t matter. To use Snapshots, you must be running Time Machine, there can’t be another OS on the system and you have only a 24 hour window since the last TM backup to the state you are restoring (Mojave in this example). One time when trying to make Catalina work on my MBP test machine, I missed the 24 hour window to go back to Mojave and had to Restore the old way which took a few hours.

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=64689

[dix]

Largely OT, but I'm wondering how MN folks are backing up their VI libraries these days.

I've never been all that diligent about backing up data that I know I can download again if disaster strikes. But, at this point, with so many libraries on multiple SSDs, that could mean a lot of head scratching and downtime just figuring out/remembering what all needed to be downloaded and restored from where, if/when it comes up.

I've never made the libraries part of my Time Machine scheme, but lately I'm thinking I should (an additional WD Red'd do it). Yesterday I selected my VI drives to be included in my Backblaze backups (in a mere 98 days I'll be all backed up at 1gb upload!), but I have no idea what the experience of restoring from a cloud would be like.

What are yous all doing re backing up VI libraries? Thx.

[mikehalloran]

I now have three 12TB Reds backing up the four Macs on my network.

My iMac Pro has a little over 4.5 TB of VIs spread over two SATA III SSDs connected via TB2 while my MBP only has about 1.3TB on its 2TB System drive. My wife's MB Air and iMac combined are a little over .6TB combined.

From the install of the drive, the first complete backup of my iMP to each new disk took a little over three days via Gigabyte Ethernet. If/when WD makes twin drive housings that support 10GBe, I might buy one but I know that the platter speed is the real bottleneck. I buy the 5400 version of the Reds to keep heat and noise to an absolute minimum.

If I found a cloud service that behaved like Time Machine, I'd sign up but I haven't (yet?).

The SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) nonsense is a non-issue as far as I'm concerned since Reds over 8TB aren't made that way and I would never set up Time Machine to RAID 0. Those concerned about SMR need to look at all high capacity drives being made nowadays since Seagate and Hitachi are also shipping high capacity SMR HDDs

[monkey man]

What's this newfangled "Shingled Magnetic Recording", Mike?

If you could sum it up in a sentence or two it'd save my goin' down a rabbit hole and suffocating for a while...

Thanks brother.

[HCMarkus]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_ ... _recording

Conventional hard disk drives record data by writing non-overlapping magnetic tracks parallel to each other (perpendicular magnetic recording, PMR), while shingled recording writes new tracks that overlap part of the previously written magnetic track, leaving the previous track narrower and allowing for higher track density. Thus, the tracks partially overlap similar to roof shingles.

The overlapping-tracks architecture complicates the writing process since writing to one track also overwrites an adjacent track. If adjacent tracks contain valid data, they must be rewritten as well. As a result, SMR drives are divided into many append-only (sequential) zones of overlapping tracks that need to be rewritten entirely when full, resembling flash blocks in solid state drives.

[mikehalloran]

Someone has decided to file lawsuits against WD over the issue ignoring that all three manufacturers are now making SMR drives.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-cl ... -us-canada

Since SMR is how huge capacity (16TB and up) HDDs can be made while keeping the 3.5” form factor, I expect that the only result of these suits is better labeling and marketing as is already being done. There’s a big market for these still and the market is where these issues will be decided — once the judge stops laughing. Oh, I imagine that WD will offer some kind of a trade-in program for those who feel they bought the wrong drives between January and June of this year but I’ll be surprised if it goes any further.

I went with 12TB over 14TB because of price/performance. That extra 2TB cost a lot more and I don’t need TimeMachine drives that large. They are replacing a trio of perfectly working 6TB Reds — perhaps I’ll try to get $100 on eBay for them.

[HCMarkus]

Someone has decided to file lawsuits against WD over the issue ignoring that all three manufacturers are now making SMR drives.

Nonsense.

WD did a silent change in their Red Series of drives, which created issues for some edge cases in RAID arrays, not to mention the degradation in performance. That is why WD is the defendant here. As Backblaze notes:

The downside occurs when data is deleted and that space is reused. If existing data overlaps the space you want to reuse, this can mean delays in writing the new data. These drives are great for archive storage (write once, read many) use cases, but if your files turn over with some regularity, stick with PMR drives.

SMR drives are often the least expensive drives available when you consider the cost per gigabyte. If you are price sensitive, you may believe you are getting a great deal, but you may be buying the wrong drive for your use case. For example, buying SMR drives for your NAS device running RAID 6 would be ugly because of all the rewrites that may be involved.

[mikehalloran]

Someone has decided to file lawsuits against WD over the issue ignoring that all three manufacturers are now making SMR drives.

Nonsense.

WD did a silent change in their Red Series of drives, which created issues for some edge cases in RAID arrays, not to mention the degradation in performance. That is why WD is the defendant here. As Backblaze notes:

The downside occurs when data is deleted and that space is reused. If existing data overlaps the space you want to reuse, this can mean delays in writing the new data. These drives are great for archive storage (write once, read many) use cases, but if your files turn over with some regularity, stick with PMR drives.

SMR drives are often the least expensive drives available when you consider the cost per gigabyte. If you are price sensitive, you may believe you are getting a great deal, but you may be buying the wrong drive for your use case. For example, buying SMR drives for your NAS device running RAID 6 would be ugly because of all the rewrites that may be involved.

Read all the articles. All four makers are now making SMR drives. I don’t know when Toshiba and WD started but Seagate and HGST have been making them since 2014.

So called “silent updates” of electronics happen all the time. There is no reason to believe that this is anything other than a blunder in the marketing department. They didn’t let people know. Perhaps they didn’t test adequately. Oops. Some of the redress sought in the lawsuits is beyond ridiculous — no court is going to tell WD what they can and cannot put in their products if it doesn’t involve food products or sales to the Defense Deparment.

I’ve been involved in hardware, software, OEM and IP licensing off and on for over 30 years. Not all at the same time, of course, and I’m in talks to get back into that field (it would be premature for me to say for whom—or if I will take the job). Someday, if we’re ever having a beer, ask me about Intel vs AMD and microcode, second source agreements and the Pentium—I was on one of the juries for that circus ride.

I may have spent the last 13 1/2 years working for ASCAP but this is my playpen.

Back OT for a second (sorry). Who in the world would run a RAID 6 array for Time Machine? I can’t imagine running any RAID array for TM although WD My Cloud Mirror defaults to RAID 1.

[monkey man]

Ahh... thank you Sir Markus and Mike for 'splainin' SMR to lil' ol' me.

[dix]

I now have three 12TB Reds backing up the four Macs on my network.

My iMac Pro has a little over 4.5 TB of VIs spread over two SATA III SSDs connected via TB2 while my MBP only has about 1.3TB on its 2TB System drive. My wife's MB Air and iMac combined are a little over .6TB combined.

From the install of the drive, the first complete backup of my iMP to each new disk took a little over three days via Gigabyte Ethernet. If/when WD makes twin drive housings that support 10GBe, I might buy one but I know that the platter speed is the real bottleneck. I buy the 5400 version of the Reds to keep heat and noise to an absolute minimum. ...

Re my OT question of whether to backup VI libaries, I think you're saying here that you simply include your VI libraries along with everything else in your system(s).

[I know I should know the answer to this but do not]: Does adding a drive via "Select Disk..." in the Time Machine Preferences panel, add a redundant TM backup disk, or add capacity? ...the latter is what I'm after.

Thx!

[mikehalloran]

Re my OT question of whether to backup VI libaries, I think you're saying here that you simply include your VI libraries along with everything else in your system(s).

Thanks for pointing that out. Apparently, I mentioned it in another thread and wasn't clear in this one.

Including my VIs in TimeMachine is exactly why I'm replacing three perfectly good 6TB Reds with a trio 12TBs. I'd have to look at the dates but there may be a bit of the original 3 yr. warranty left on the 6s.

In addition, I'm taking out a couple of 3TB drives including a WD Green from 2011 that still works and passes SMART with flying colors(!?!?!) — only one like that I've seen — plus a 2013 Time Capsule tower w/ aSeagate where the wi-fi is flakey but that feature can't be turned off. Both those 3TBs run hot and my daughters with their five Macs have moved out. Time to simplify.

: Does adding a drive via "Select Disk..." in the Time Machine Preferences panel, add a redundant TM backup disk, or add capacity? ...the latter is what I'm after.

It adds another backup drive in the queue. TM backs up hourly and when there are multiple drives, it goes round-robin.

To add capacity, you can get a larger drive or pair drives in RAID 0 — which nearly doubles speed. Problem with RAID 0 is that, if one drive goes down, the data is gone on both. Speed is not an issue with TM anyway.

RAID 1 writes to both drives simultaneously but even though they're pretty quiet, you'll likely hear a RAID 1 array — I did in my Mirror. JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives) alternates the individual HDDs in Time Machine, cutting the wear and noise in half. I was surprised that, as quiet as my 3 year old Reds are, the new ones run nearly silent.

I'm really uncomfortable having fewer than three drives in rotation as Time Machine backups. Like my desktop Macs internet gateway and wireless server, those three are plugged into a UPS. When the power goes down, I want some time to shut everything down though, frankly, it's not a big issue with Time Machine.

APFS Snapshots adds a nice layer of redundancy and, if properly set up, can restore your entire system drive in a few minutes. The first few minutes of every TM backup is to write a new Snapshot to your system drive.