Looking to add a backup desktop hard drive

[SHRED]

I have a solid state Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500gb running Win 10 Home.
I have a Hitachi HTS541616J9SA00 160GB as a backup drive.

My overall system is a bit old but still running fine with an Intel Quad Core 6600 on a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L motherboard and 8g ram.

My question is would a solid state backup drive give me better reliability?

I recently had an external HD crash and will pay the price to recover the data. I am wanting another internal HD as part of my multiple point backup plan. Plus I am getting another external drive through the company that will recover my crash which unfortunately will need a "clean room" recovery.

Thank you for any advice for adding a hard drive (type, brand, etc...). I am looking at about 2TB capacity.

[TreasonousBastard]

1. Probably not. SSD's haven't proven to be more reliable than anythinge else. They are...

faster but much more expensive, as you found out with your 500 gig drive.

You can get a handful of terabytes for what you spend on one SSD. I have an old Seagate 350MB external drive that holds most of my files, and that's backed up to another Seagate 1 TB and a 2TB WD drive. Almost 3 1/2 TB for $150 bucks or so.

And then there's that cloud. Flickr, Dropbox, Onedrive, Google drive, Evernote and a bunch of places to store stuff.

[SHRED]

2. Yeah they are fast!

But expensive.
It did breathe new life into my PC.

I am looking at a Seagate Barracuda 3 TB.

https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-BarraCuda-3-5-Inch-Internal-ST1000DM010/dp/B01IEKG4NE/ref=pd_lpo_vtph_147_lp_t_2?_encoding=UTF8&refRID=5FSP3N7Y95CJ6AQHN21Q&th=1

[TreasonousBastard]

3. For backup, I would stay with external drives that you can disconnect...

if your stuff is that valuable, regularly switch between drives so one is unplugged if your system goes down.

[SHRED]

4. Good idea

[Egnever]

6. Unless you store a lot of photos or videos

A handful of terabytes is useless.

Most people in my experience use less than 60 gigs of drive space.

Overbuying storage serves no purpose whatsoever. For that same $150 you could get three years of unlimited storage with a service like carbonite that is a much better backup anyway since it is off site and would protect you in the case of a burglary or fire or other natural disaster.

Given the average hard drive life is 3-4 years in the end you might save yourself a dollar or two going with an external but should a disaster hit your house all that extra storage would be for naught anyway.

[BadgerKid]

5. Consider two backups, one of which is kept off-site.

If you have security concerns, encrypt the entire drive or just the particular sensitive files. I'd stick with the major brand drives (Samsung, WD, Toshiba, Seagate, HGST), though I think there has been some consolidation in the drive market in recent years.