External H/D for Long-term backups

[Kae]

Hi Guys,

At work we use Raid arrays and output to digital tape so it's never a concern, but for home use, what would you recommend as a long-term external hard drive?

I'm currently capturing a friends childhood home video's, and once I've finished with them I'll render them out and encode to DVD.... but ideally, she'd like to keep hold of the AVI files... which are frankly, huge!

So what would you recommend in the region of 1TB as a long term reasonably safe H/D? Budget is tight, but it's one that will stretch for the "right" product.

Edit: I realise that no H/D is going to last forever, but one that has a reasonable chance of lasting a while would be a good start!

Thanks,

Andy.

 

[ChileanLlama]

It sounds like pretty important data you have there.

If you can stretch to it I'd suggest a solution that doesn't rely on a single disk - perhaps a NAS that will allow you to put 2 disks in and run in RAID1. Then if one drive suffers a physical failure you shouldn't lose everything. You're probably looking around £200+ though for the NAS and 2x1TB drives

More hassle, but cheaper would be to just get 2x1TB drives and a couple of cheap enclosures and backup to them alternately. The Samsung F2 is cheapest 1TB drive here at £56 each, and that's probably as good as any drive for storage.