I am investigating alternatives to Rollback RX which takes snapshots each day and allows the user to restore a windows system to a previous state within a minute or so. I know this isn’t a backup solution, but it does provide a useful and fast way of reversing errors or problems. Its saved me a number of times when I have experienced unexpected system crashes etc. or have installed software I would like to remove without trace.
I have read that Macrium Reflect can take incremental backups each day and can restore to these backups very quickly (never tried it though). However I’m not sure how fast it works compared to Rollback RX. Unlike Rollback RX, Macrium requires an external storage device . Presumably a SSD would be much faster than a HDD for this task ?
Macrium restores are fast (on the paid version, which has the incremental feature you are talking about) but not as fast as Rollback.
The free version, which only does full and differential backups, has a slower restore speed. This is because the paid version is better at detecting the bits that changed, and it restores only them.
You don't need an external storage device to use Macrium. I do restores all the time from Macrium backups that are stored on my second internal hard disk.
You might be able to do it with only one internal hard disk if you make a separate partition on which to store your backups. I never tried that so I can't vouch for it.
Macrium takes time to do its job, regardless of what type of storage media you are using. The disk onto which you are restoring is more important than the disk on which you put the backup, because write speeds are slower than read speeds.
If you are restoring from an external disk, unless you are using USB 3.1 or better, I don't think you will see a big difference between HDD and SSD.
External disks with USB 3.1 are a bit pricey last time I looked. I wanted one, but I had to settle for USB 3.0 because of budget.