Two drives better than one?

[weyland yutani]

I need about 1TB max of storage, is it good practise to buy two 500Gb drives instead of one 1TB drive?

If I need to reintall OS or drive failure occures I have a backup/redundancy. Does this make sense or am I being stupid

 

[rpstewart]

If you need 1Tb of storage then I'd buy 2 1Tb drives. That way you have enough space to backup everything you need to store.

How you do that and whether you do it as a backup or for redundancy (backup and redundancy are very different things remember) is a different question.

 

[ChrisD.]

As Stewart says, you should buy twice the capacity.

You could run RAID 1 which will increase read times as well as giving you two copies of your data if one drive fails.

If you want to have a backup outside of your PC then get a NAS. You can then chose what to backup via Windows Backup or other software and chose the NAS as the destination drive. This way you have control over what you backup, plus any space on the drive that isn't used could be made use of.