Hello All,
My MacOS is too old and I’m afraid that it may give up anytime so I want to start backing up my system regularly. I’m looking for a reliable, cheap and lightweight SSD external drive to backup files. Can anyone suggest something from their experience?
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Welcome to the tech forum mac 
Any SSD will be fine as SSDs don’t have any mechanical disk inside them. I’ve been using Samsung 870 EVO 2TB 2.5″ SATA III Internal SSD, MZ-77E2T0B/EU
and I’ve found it to be most reliable. Unfortunately I didn’t get any opportunity to test any other SSD. This is an internal SSD and the reason why I started to use it for backup is interesting.
Here is the full story behind it.
Long time ago I wanted to replace my mechanical hard drive with an SSD on my Windows desktop PC as it was slowing down. After some research I zeroed down on the above SSD. I bought it and replaced the old hard drive. I was amazed to see how fast my PC was performing. After seeing success I bought a few more of the above SSD drives but didn’t get a chance to use them as internal drives. At some point of time I needed to backup my files and I thought why not use these spare SSDs. So I bought a USB to SATA adapter and connected it to my iMac’s USB port and bingo it worked. Transferring files was super fast. I bought a few more of these bad ass SSDs for backups.
Even though these are internal SSDs, I love using them as external SSD for backups. They are extremely light, affordable and haven’t given me any trouble anytime so far. Try this SSD and you can thank me later.
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Wow what an interesting story. Thanks for sharing it. I’ll buy this SSD.
Nice usage of internal drive as external storage Why didn’t I think of that?
Do we need to format it to be used on iMac with MacOS?
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Connect it to iMac as I’ve shown you in the photo, it is connected to the USB port on the iMac on the back. If you can see the drive in the finder then you are good to go, if not then format it.
Internal SSDs have one crucial advantage over external SSDs, you can use internal SSDs as internal as well as external drive. You can’t use external SSDs are internal SSD. Hats off to @technuisance for sharing such a good hack. If you just want external SSD then I would recommend Crucial X8 2TB Portable SSD – Up to 1050MB/s – PC and Mac – USB 3.2 External Solid State Drive – CT2000X8SSD9. This SSD is faster than Samsung SSD, check speed for the both.
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