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Comment by alt227 | Hacker News Reader

What would an example of "other external storage device" be in this instance?

You’d think a network drive would be included. Apple used to also provide instructions for connecting a network drive but they stopped with macOS 15 or 26. Now a drive that is physically connected to a Mac is the only method of using Time Machine that Apple officially recognizes.

edit: to be clear you can still use a network drive, but how well that works is the big question. It will probably depend on the user and the setup. The Macs in my house backup to a share on a Pi 4. They can still restore files from it just fine.

They recognize NAS, still, though for instructions they refer you to the manufacturer: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102423#nas

Thunderbolt external SSD, would be the only Apple-ish thing. (Formerly of course, FireWire.)

To be absolutely complete, I could mention that at least one SAS HBA PCIe card exists on the market with support for macOS 27, even. Sometimes bundled with other products...

> at least one SAS HBA PCIe card exists on the market with support for macOS 27

Really? I guess now that the Mac Pro is discontinued, products like that are on borrowed time.

You can still have an external Thunderbolt-to-PCIe slots box too.

What would be the benefit of a thunderbolt to PCIe enclosure with an HBA SAS SSD card inside, instead of just a regular external thunderbolt SSD drive? Apart from many thousands of dollars of course.

The point would be to have an enclosure of several/many SAS HDD's that you want to connect. The Thunderbolt to PCIe enclosure holds the PCIe card only, and a separate SAS enclosure holds disks. (The spinning rust type, surely.)

People also connect LTO tape drives using this interface.

Having many SAS drives on the end of a single Thunderbolt connection completely defeats the point though. whats the point of the fast PCIe link and the fast SAS drives when you are bottlenecking them all on a single thunderbolt cable?

I think you're off base regarding the speeds attainable by Thunderbolt (and/or the speeds of hard drives). Feel free to peruse e.g. https://www.sonnettech.com/product/thunderbolt/pcie-card-exp... ; https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/12353459 (on PCIe and SAS bottlenecks).

Besides that, whether a throughput limit defeats the point depends on what the "point" was to begin with, as well as what the alternatives are.

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