The MacBook Pro And SSDs: Finding The Best Backup Solutions

I’m planning on doing some upgrading to my computer equipment in 2025.  The first upgrade will be to my laptop which is my primary work computer at home.  I’ll be upgrading my 16″ M1 MacBook Pro to a 16″ M4 MacBook Pro.  But I also want to make some improvements to my data storage and backup.  Currently I have have a QNAP TS-x53E two-bay NAS drive, in RAID configuration.  Inside my NAS, I have a couple of Seagate 4TB IronWolf Pro hard drives, so I’m getting about 2.6TB of actual storage space due to the RAID configuration.  I’ve had this NAS setup for two years and currently have about 2TB of data backed up on the NAS, and have about 600GB available.  In addition, for several years I’ve had a couple of Western Digital back up drives that I’ll back up the files on my NAS to once a year, then throw them in the safe.     I’ve got two problems I’m looking to solve in my upgrade path.  First, I’m running out of space on my NAS.  Second, I’m not happy with the read/write and transfer speeds I’m seeing – particularly on that once-a-year backup I do of the NAS on to the back up hard drives.  It can literally take days to complete.  I have the QNAP hooked up to my CalDigit TS4 Thunderbolt 4 Dock via 2.5GbE port.  But obviously with SATA HDs in the QNAP spinning at 5400RPM, I’m not getting anywhere near that speed when moving filed between the QNAP NAS and my MacBook Pro.  So obviously I’d like to take advantage of the Thunderbolt 5 ports on the M4 MacBook Pro and get some Thunderbolt 5 storage devices.

At this stage, I really wasn’t entirely sure what direction I wanted to go in to improve my set up.  But I’ve been wanting to play with some of the newer portable SSDs on the market.  With Christmas Amazon gift card firmly in hand, my first step was to order  The SanDisk 4TB Extreme Portable SSD.  These things have really dropped in price – I got mine for just $229.00.  Connected via the included USB-C  (supports USB 3.2 Gen 2) it’s capable of transfer speeds of 1050MB/s read and 1000MB/s write – not bad.

The idea behind this drive is that it will be a bit of a utility player for me.  I can back up my NAS to this SSD, which I’ve done.  It took just 3 hours to back up 2TB from my NAS to the SSD.  I can toss it in the safe, and toss out the old Western Digital backup HDs I’ve been using.  Plus, there’s plenty of unused space on the drive if I need to bring it with me when traveling.  Note that in 2023/2024 there were reports of SanDisk SSD failures.  I believe the problems have been corrected, but here’s a good article (including a resource to check if your SanDisk SSD is an affected model) explaining the issues.

My next consideration was what to do about my NAS. Technically speaking, I could upgrade the “old” SATA hard drives in the QNAP to SSDs.  But would the juice be worth the squeeze?  To get more storage capacity, I’d have to go from the current 4TB drives to 8TB drives.  To double my current storage drives from 4TB to 8TB with something like the Samsung PM883 8TB SSD would run about $430 per drive. So that’s $860 for 4TB of usable storage, that would be limited to 2.5 GbE transfer speeds.  Honestly, the transfer speeds aren’t a huge consideration because I’m using the QNAP NAS purely as reliable, redundant backup.  So I’m not transferring files back and forth between my laptop and the NAS all that often.  Compared to the cost of simply upgrading the HDs in the QNAP, moving to 8TB SSDs doesn’t make sense.  Currently Seagate IronWolf 8TB drives are going for $180.00 on Amazon.  So for what I’m using the NAS for, $360 vs. $860 is a no brainer.  But then I started looking at whether upgrading the NAS even made sense.  For another $229.00 I could simply buy a second SandDisk external SSD and keep two separate backups of my home data.  One I can keep in the safe, and the other I can keep in my office at work – that way a copy survives even if the house burns down.  That’s a level of protection I don’t currently have with my QNAP NAS.  So I think for my needs, I’ll just stick my QNAP and in my safe as yet another backup of my data and start primarily using SSDs for backup purposes.  Two SSDs in case one fails and one being in a separate location is about as safe as you can get for data backup.  But is another SanDisk the right solution?  There’s a “pro” version of the SanDisk SSD I just bought – the SanDisk 4TB Extreme PRO Portable SSD.  The difference between the one I have and the Pro version is support for USB 3.2 Gen 2×2.  So it has 2000MB/s read/write speeds – double the model I just purchased.  It’s only about $50 more at $279 as of this writing.  SanDisk also has a Thunderbolt 3 SSD – the SanDisk Professional 4TB PRO-G40 SSD.  It jumps to $352, but now you’re starting to approach speeds that wouldn’t be too different in real world usage from the 6,400 MB/s read speed and 5,400 MB/s of the M4 MacBook Pro internal SSD HD.

The only other thing I’m considering doing later in 2025  is getting a Thunderbolt  5 external SSD as a “working drive” for my MacBook Pro.  My current M1 MacBook Pro has a 2TB internal SSD, and the new MacBook Pro will also have a 2TB internal SSD.  So I’ve never really had enough internal HD space to keep my entire photo archive/library on my computer.  Again, as of this writing Thunderbolt 5 is pretty new – there are only a couple of Thunderbolt 5 SSDs available, and 4TB models would cost about $600.00.  But this would be a drive that would have read/write performance as good or better than the MacBook Pro internal SSD HD.  Imagine an external drive with performance that’s indistinguishable from the internal drive? The YouTube channel Max Tech actually did a test comparing the 4TB version of the OWC Envoy Ultra ($60o) to a “DIY” Thunderbolt 5 enclosure and SSD ($500).  Max Tech used the SAMSUNG 990 PRO 4TB SSD (currently at $329) inside a Trebleet Thunderbolt 5 enclosure ($199).  The results were quite astonishing in favor of the DIY option:

Note that the “DIY” solution not only outperformed the OWC Drive, it also marginally outperformed the internal drive on the MacBook Pro!  Max Tech transferred a 300GB file from an M4 MacBook Pro to the DIY Thunderbolt 5 in just 56 seconds.  That means the 2TB backup I did on the SanDisk Extreme SSD I just bought that took 3 hours to complete would only take about 7 minutes on the DIY Thunderbolt 5 SSD.

Again, these are early days for Thunderbolt 5 peripherals.  I’m probably not going to buy my working external drive for about three months, and I think there will be more options available at that time for both drives and DIY components.  The point here is to show what’s possible with the new Thunderbolt five ports available on the M4 MacBook Pro.  I think 2025 is going to be a very good year.