Time machine drives . . .

[mspace]

So what's the current favorite brand for a 2.5 drive for Time Machine?
Current one is a WD Black, 5 TB, making a grinding noise.
I think it's asking to be replaced.

[Tiangou]

Seagate spinners, Samsung SSDs.

[mspace]

Tiangou wrote:
Seagate spinners, Samsung SSDs.

Since SSDs are either live or dead, where spinner data can be salvaged if drive is failing, are spinners preferred for Time Machine?

[raz]

I’ve moved onto a NAS. It’s a bit more expensive, but has many advantages. I can back up all Macs in the house to one box. I can RAID large spinners together and not worry if one fails. And, laptops don’t need to be plugged into one.

[Tiangou]

mspace wrote:
[quote=Tiangou]
Seagate spinners, Samsung SSDs.

Since SSDs are either live or dead, where spinner data can be salvaged if drive is failing, are spinners preferred for Time Machine?
With backups as with anything else, the speed, low power-draw, and general reliability of a SSD vs a hard drive are very advantageous.

Yes, there are other considerations... But you're talking about edge-cases.

Whether home data recovery is do-able often depends on what part of the drive has failed. If a bridge fails, for example, doesn't matter whether it's a hard drive or SSD, just pop it in a new enclosure and pull your data off. (Unless it's a Western Digital 2.5-inch drive, in which case, you're screwed because the USB port is integrated into the drive.)

If a drive suffers catastrophic failure, your data is just gone in any practical sense.

If the drive seems dead and you've got the money for it, you could send your 2.5-inch spinner to DriveSavers... You could also send them a SSD.

Or you could follow best-practices and buy two backup drives so you don't have to rely on just one and then don't worry about whether it's backing up to HD or SSD.