Recommended hard drives for photo storage

[Sportseditor123]

Hi all, I'm looking into hard drives for photo storage.

I'm seeing prices and sizes that run the gamut. I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations on some of the brands or types of drives.

For example, Seagate has a 24TB external hard drive (that would last me a while) for $240 on sale. The bad reviews say it's too loud.

A Sandisk 4TB portable external drive is nearly $300. That's 20TB less. I'm not worried about it being portable. It can just sit next to my laptop. I've got a 2TB Sandisk that works well, but I need a bigger drive that's reliable and would like to pay a reasonable price.

Thanks for any help!

[Jkarl]

It is not a good idea to depend on one storage option so multiple drives stored in different location would be the safest way as any drive can malfunction at any time. I know that this method can be troublesome but in the long run it is the best method to keep your photos accessible.  

[Jkarl]

A second tip. If I am going to be away from home for a number of days I will carry a small laptop, a card reader and 2 smaller external SSD drives. At the end of the day I will copy the photo files to the 2 drives and if you have enough memory cards, I would change those out for fresh ones. If you do not have enough memory cards it would be wise to format them before using them again to keep the confusion of which files you have already backed up.

When I get home, I then copy them to more permanent storage devices and then the portable drives are ready to use for the next trip.

I know this sounds tedious, but I have lost photos by having a memory card malfunction.

Then there is always cloud storage available but that can get expensive.

Remember redundancy is your friend when it comes to backups.

[shadowsports]

Jkarl's advice is sound.  I do the same thing when I'm on the road retaining multiple back ups via cards, external disk and a laptop.

For home storage, I use a mix of NAS, external and internal storage.  I have 2 NAS devices that use RTRR.  Hardware does fail and relying on one device (single point of failure) always ends in disaster.  For ultimate protection a solution should also include an offsite back up (physical or cloud) which can protect against fire or theft.  Brands are less important than redundancy.

[normadel]

24 TB is an impractically huge drive for storing your photos. You should never want to entrust a huge amount of data on one drive. 2 TB is a good starting point. You will be surprised at its capacity, and if you start to get it filling up, get a second drive. 

Remember too that if your data is valuable to you, having two drives lets you backup the contents of the "main" drive to the other one.