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What's the Best Drive for Mac Time Machine Backups?

Published: 2. August 2026

Live answer · Amazon.com

Pulling live prices…

Live data across PricePerGig listings. Prices may change; Updated every few hours.

📊 Stand 2. August 2026 liegt die typische HDD bei Amazon.de bei 217 €/TB bzw. 0,217 €/GB über die 3,610 von uns erfassten Live-Angebote, mit der größten Auswahl an Laufwerken um 50,7 €/TB bzw. 0,051 €/GB. Die besten Angebote bei Amazon.de beginnen bei etwa 300 € für 8TB (37,5 €/TB), 360 € für 14TB (25,7 €/TB) und 525 € für 20TB (26,2 €/TB). Das aktuell beste Preis-Leistungs-Verhältnis bietet 18TB mit rund 22,2 € pro TB.

Sourced from real discussions on r/mac and r/applehelp, cross-checked against live PricePerGig listings.

Setting up Time Machine on your Mac and wondering what drive to buy? Good news, this is the easy and cheap kind of storage decision.

You want a big external hard drive. Not an SSD. Big and cheap.

Time Machine backs up quietly in the background, so speed is irrelevant. Capacity is what matters, and hard drives give you the most of it per pound.

The table above shows the live price per TB on your marketplace for exactly the kind of drive Time Machine loves.

Why a hard drive, not an SSD

This is where people overspend, so let me stop you.

Time Machine works away in the background, snapshotting your files over time. You are almost never sitting there watching it or waiting on it.

That means SSD speed is completely wasted. You would be paying several times more per TB for performance your backups never use.

A big cheap hard drive is the right tool. Put the money you save into more capacity, which Time Machine actually benefits from.

How big should it be?

Here is the rule that makes Time Machine shine.

Buy a drive several times bigger than the data you are backing up. Two to three times is a good target.

Why so big? Because Time Machine does not just keep one copy. It keeps a history of older versions, so you can roll back a file to how it looked last week or last month. The more space you give it, the deeper that history goes.

So a generous drive is not waste here. It directly buys you a longer, more useful backup history. Check the live table and size up.

What to actually buy

Keep it simple.

A plain, roomy external drive does this job perfectly. No need for anything fancy or fast.

Do not stop at one copy

A gentle but important nudge.

Time Machine on a local drive is a great first backup. But it lives in the same house as your Mac.

For anything irreplaceable, add a second copy somewhere else. A cloud backup or a drive kept offsite means a fire or theft does not take both your Mac and its backup at once.

Time Machine plus an offsite copy is a genuinely solid setup.

The bottom line

The best Time Machine drive is a big, cheap external hard drive, sized a few times larger than your data so the version history has room to breathe.

Skip the SSD, chase the best price per TB on the live table above, and add an offsite copy for the irreplaceable stuff. Cheap, roomy, and your Mac is properly protected, no fuss and no overspendng.

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