HDD - External Vs. Internal

[Battalion23]

Heya,
Thinking about getting a 2nd HDD, thought about internal and external... checked prices, but still have one small question.
Externals look nice, and I love the power button... I'm going to store my videos,pics... nothing that has to be available all the time. but the price difference... I rather go with internal and save 30~50$...
Thing is, after 10 years, and around 3 crashed hard drives, and roughly 1000 tears for all the lost data... I wanna give this data the best chance to survive the longest. sure, drives today are so much better, but let's say I buy internal, transfer all the files to it, just videos . the OS is on the 1st drive... will the new drive will be accesible, but if I don't access it, maybe it doesn't even spin?
If I would have bought external, I would store the videos, than turn it off ... until I wanna see them again, let's say at least a week. and to compare a drive that runs every couple of minutes, and one that runs every other week... you'd have an easy bet on which would go the longest without errors...
Thanks...

 

[Ika]

I think the life of a hard drive has nothing to do with how often it's accessed... don't remember the source, though. My thoughts have been that an external drive would die faster, due to 1) the possible failure of the enclosure hardware, and 2) being moved from place to place.

What size hard drive are you looking for? Most of the 500gb hard drives I've been looking at are usually around $100 best price, both internal and external.

 

[ding5550123]

I would go with the internal drives. They would have a higher access speed (it sounds like you don't mind the speed though) You might be able to find a raid 1 card for redundancy. In windows, you are able to set the hard disks time when they turn off after inactivity. I'm not sure if this will affect your other OS drive when you do this.

 

[GeezerMan]

Since many chipsets support hot swapping of sata drives, meaning you can turn them on and off while in windows, I was thing of mounting drives inside the case and wiring a power switch to the front panel on a spare bay cover. You can also buy a selector switch that installs in a 5.25 bay. The downside is they would be on the same circuit as the other drives, and if some accident happened that blows the drives, poof. That would be kinda rare though.

 

[WoodButcher]

I use something like this and backup to old drives occasionally, I keep 4 or 500 gig worth of hard drives in my system for daily use and file things I want to keep on scavenged drives and store them away. I have a 250 gig and 320 I use for backup on a regular basis but also have a few smaller laying around. Using something like "Ghost" or "Acronis" are good if your willing to keep up the software and very easy but I prefer full backups or copies of my important goodies.
If you have sata drives these guys are nice paired up w/ this also works very well and is much faster than USB.

 

[PCTC2]

I think your best bet for data security is an internal RAID setup.
After 3 years and 11 failed harddrives, I have learned RAID 1 is your best friend (I personally use RAID 1, 10, 0+1, and 5 on different arrays).
But at your point, RAID is hard to implement because you'd have to buy two identical drives, then image your current one, set up the RAID array and format, and then apply your image to the new array. A PITA.

EDIT: Before I used RAID, I have personally lost over 1.5TB of personal data including my LEGAL music collection, my family photographs (I had CD's but I lost them in a move and now I have nothing), my home videos, and backup ISOs of all my CDs I own because I have a habit of losing CDs as you can see.