How to acquire a backup disk
In honor of the recent World Backup Day, here are tips for acquiring hard or solid-state disks as replacements, for additional storage or for backup.
First and foremost, if you are replacing your startup disk or will use this disk to boot your Mac, you absolutely and positively want a solid-state drive (SSD), not a hard disk drive (HDD).
Yes, SSDs cost more, but trust me, it’ll be worth it because today’s macOS is optimized for SSDs and not hard disks. The result is that everything happens faster. With an SSD, your Mac will start up two or three times faster, and your apps and documents will launch much more quickly.
If you need more storage and don’t care to replace your boot drive, consider which is more appropriate: an external SSD or an HDD. Pricier SSDs are faster when copying files, and files stored on them open noticeably faster than ones stored on an HDD. If you’re planning to store your music or photo libraries on this external drive (as so many of us do), you’ll be amazed at how much more responsive those apps become when their libraries reside on an SSD.
In other words, if you can afford a solid-state drive, it’s almost always your best option, with one exception: backups. When it comes to backups, I feel that cost and redundancy are more important than speed, so I back up all my data to hard disk drives. And, since all disks fail eventually, I back up everything at least three ways: with a local backup, an offsite backup and a cloudbased backup.
I shop for backup disks at all the usual places — Amazon.com, Macsales.com, BestBuy.com and the like — and then choose the biggest, cheapest hard disk drive available. I only care which one has the lowest cost per gigabyte and comes with a factory warranty.
If you’re thinking about drives that claim a mean time between failures (MTBF) of a million hours or more, I don’t put much stock in those figures. It’s not telling you that your drive isn’t going to fail before a million hours. Some drives will fail sooner, and others will fail later; the only constant is that all drives fail eventually.