For the technically inclined and the financially able, and the technical ability to set it up, the best hardware solution while relying on internal drives is a RAID 10 array. Mirrored-striped array allowing hotswapping of bad drives as necessary while also having the second fastest data write speeds of all RAID levels. Have to have a minimum of 4 identical drives though for it to work and be of any use. 4x512mb SSDs or 4x1TB standard platter drives, with a mirrored set of data on any two of the drives, should ensure survivability of most data.

But who has that kind of money? I considered getting a 1TB SSD for my laptop to help me with gaming and I was told it's over $1K.

(December 23, 2018, 12:33 am)egnever23 For the technically inclined and the financially able, and the technical ability to set it up, the best hardware solution while relying on internal drives is a RAID 10 array. Mirrored-striped array allowing hotswapping of bad drives as necessary while also having the second fastest data write speeds of all RAID levels. Have to have a minimum of 4 identical drives though for it to work and be of any use. 4x512mb SSDs or 4x1TB standard platter drives, with a mirrored set of data on any two of the drives, should ensure survivability of most data.

While this is all true, the drives and the RAID controller also play a big part in the reliability of this kind of setup. Most hardware RAID controllers (like those commonly found in servers) can pretty easily withstand a drive failure without any noticeable impact. However, software RAIDs (like the Intel, NVIDIA, etc. RAID-capable SATA controllers on many motherboards) can really shit the bed due to a failed or failing drive. My old setup booted from an SSD and leveraged a 4x2TB RAID 5 for raw storage, all on an Intel X99-based motherboard. I know RAID 5 isn't the greatest setup by any means, but I was on a budget and needed the most raw storage I could get. When one of the drives started to act up (without actually failing or throwing any SMART errors, mind you) my computer's performance went to total shit. I moved everything off of that RAID and it got better, but one day months later I rebooted the computer and the drive finally failed. In a RAID 5 the array should have been degraded but perfectly operable, but the PC wouldn't boot until I just yanked all the RAID drives out.

The only point I'm making is to not let yourself get lulled into a false sense of security just because your bad self bought a shitload of drives (either platters or solid state) and successfully initialized a RAID. If it's not on a server-grade RAID controller, then it could be the controller (and not necessarily the drives) that bites you in the ass. Also, the read/write operations associated with a RAID will burn through an SSD's lifespan faster, but I suspect RAID 10 isn't nearly as bad as RAID 5/6 because there isn't any parity data being spread out amongst the drives.

(December 23, 2018, 2:59 am)McKormick But who has that kind of money? I considered getting a 1TB SSD for my laptop to help me with gaming and I was told it's over $1K.

You can get a pretty damn good 1TB SSD for less than $150 now: https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Inch-Inte...B078DPCY3T

Or, under $175 if you need an M.2 drive instead of a 2.5 inch: https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-860-SATA-...B07822Z77M

At this point is there a reason to choose cloud storage over local storage since the price of SSDs/MicroSD cards are drastically going down?

(December 25, 2018, 1:37 pm)Milkjetstream At this point is there a reason to choose cloud storage over local storage since the price of SSDs/MicroSD cards are drastically going down?

If your computer gets stolen or lost, if your apartment/house is destroyed by fire/natural disaster/aliens/nuclear attack, if you take a direct hit from lightning and experience a power surge, if your drives crash or become otherwise corrupted (e.g. from malware/ransomware), etc., then cloud storage would be a good thing to have.

I’ve said it before on other threads and I’ll say it again here... any data you care about should be stored in at least three places: 1) its actual ”hot” storage location (i.e. internal HDD/SSD attached to your computer); 2) a “warm” onsite backup which is stored on separate physical media (e.g. external USB hard drive which backs up your internal drive); 3) an offsite backup stored either in the cloud (e.g. Google Drive, iCloud, etc. etc.) or at least as an offline copy kept at a different physical location (e.g. your office, your vacation home, a safety deposit box). Lacking any one of those three greatly increases your chances of losing data due to some kind of failure.

(December 19, 2018, 7:17 pm)SweetMilk Man I don't even know where to start, my drives are failing one after the other and my latest drive i bought just over two months ago failed on me last night (2tb pretty much full). i had another fail on me not long ago which was the 4tb version but managed to fix it. i'm beyond upset so thinking i should stop all of this (at least for a while) but i just can't get over it.

May I ask what brand of HDD were you using???

I used to have several external 1 tb hardcover a few brick sized and a couple smaller than than my cell phone all of them lasted me through sever all computers over several years one that worked the best was a solid state hardwire I think it was called a passport drive reason it quit being useful the usb cable connection failed because of misuse