recommend external drive and backup strategy / configuration for mac mini m2 pro

Edward Davis3 wrote:

....1) whether the external drive would perform significantly better if a SSD than if a standard rotating disc drive; also

An SSD will be much faster than any spinner, assuming it is NVME based which most current off the shelf integrated SSDs are.

2) if the external drive were a RAID 1 drive, like G-Technology offers, whether that would significantly change the performance; and

Drives configured as RAID1 one will generally cut write speeds in half since it needs to copy the same data to two drives and will provide no improvement in read since it will only read one drive. RAID1 duplicates the items on the drives. RAID0 interleaves data between two drives and increases the write and read speeds. However, if one drive fails in RAID0, all data is lost.

With that said, for speed, two spinning HDDs in RAID0 will still not approach the speeds of current NVME SSDs. Also, if creating a RAID0 with two SSDs, a real speed improvement will not really be achieved unless it is using a Thunderbolt 3/4 or USB4 interface.

3) whether to use a RAID enclosure like G-Technology's or use the mac mini ports to attach separate drives and use the mini to do the RAID function.

Hardware RAID is will generally perform better than software RAID.

With that said, I use both scheduled CCC backups and well as Time Machine backups and also separate backup of my data as well. Currently, I have an all SSD system for all my backups including my photos, which BTW are also have their own backup as well. Something like my photos which are instances in time that cannot ever be recovered if lost, I take extra precautions to insure I have multiple backups.