Reccomended external hard drive for storing personal, sensetive and rare data?

So I've been looking for an external hard drive to store data on as burning everything to DVDs is becoming a chore and now more trouble that it's worth. I want the hard drive to be long lasting, something that's not going to die on me one days and deny me my data. I'm wanting to store personal files, as well as things one could deem rare or sensetive, such as prototypes, images, artwork etc. I know the internet is the best external hard drive there is, however I like to keep things on me and I have quite a few files on my computer which are now extremely hard to find online, some you can no longer find at all, and I want to store them somewhere they're going to be safe and instantly accessable should I want them. Any reccomendations? I know people here are serious about storing data and making sure it lasts, so I figured this would be a great place to ask. I don't really need a large HDD right now, 500GB would to me fine, so I'd most certainly choose a 500GB over a 2TB mainly for price reasons, plus it will do untill I have money for more storage. Thanks for the help.

 

Doesn't RAID distribute chunks of data over multiple drives? I walways assumed a RAID set-up was riskier as it required all drives to be working for you to access your data. :/ I'm not very educated on this so I don't really understand the ins and outs of it.

 

What Assembler said. A single external harddrive=single point of failure=easy loss.

 

But RAID isn't economical for small amounts of data. Personally I think it's silly until you're maintaining multiple terabytes and the always-available convenience actually justifies the cost of equipment, like if you own a data center. RAID is especially unreasonable for notebook users since it generally means purchasing a NAS device.

I have a very frugal manual backup setup I'm pleased with:

-SATA docking station/cradle thing which I pair with OEM drives for large temporary storage. For secure archival I'd get a couple cheap drives, backup to them redundantly, then put them in secure storage cases.

-WD Elements. It's USB powered and about as portable as a "thumb drive" so it's extremely convenient and at $25 it was one of my best computer purchases ever. Mine is "only" 120gb, but it's far more than enough to backup my system drive, personal data and all my work.

 

Thanks for the help so far. RAID6 sounds good but I think it's a bit overkill for what I need, although it would be nice as it actually sounds very secure. I've been reading reviews on Amazon for HDD drives and loads of people are reporting failures, so I litterally have no idea what's good and what's not. One other thing, I only have a laptop, so I think the costs of a RAID setup would be too much for what I need (?). I could always buy three external drives, or whatever, and just back it up to each of them. Ultimately in the end I'm going to need something better, but right now I just need something decent to tide me over, something that's just going to keep my data safe.

 

RAID would be not the wisest thing you could do. If your house gets struck by lightning while you use it or in case of a fire/flood or if the RAID controller has a malfunction and writes crap without you noticing it etc. no RAID setup can help you recover your data.

What you can do is store it on multiple external HDD's(e.g. 3 HDD that all having the same content) which you never use at the same time and never store in the same place. And as Assembler already pointed out, make use of cloud storage for the most important things, it's cheap enough.

 

What a silly reasoning for not using RAID. If you're concerned about lightning strike, invest in a surge protector. If you're concerned about natural disaster, invest in a redundant remote backup. A faulty controller would affect *any* kind of hard drive, so just because it's an array doesn't mean a damn thing, and most disasters are recoverable.

Anyway: to answer the OP, the best way to store important personal data is by getting a cheap drive, copying all your data to it then unplugging it and putting it somewhere safe until you need it again. Then use the computer as normal - if a file dies, get the drive out of storage and make a new copy from your backup. A hard drive in a safe place is considered to be one of the most secure and long-lasting ways of keeping your data.

A good drive is the Buffalo DriveStation series of drives, which are good, durable drives. Hope that helps.