What is the most reliable storage device?

[HolyCinnamon]

What is the most reliable storage device to store photos, videos, etc. without any hardware failures or data corruption?

SSDs, SD Cards, CDs, flash drives, floppy disks?

 

[smackers_12]

Cloud services are reliable. Raid arrays of hard drives are reliable. But if you are talking about a single drive ssds have a long life. Nothing is immune to faliure

 

[USAFRet]

Copies contained on multiple hard drives.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Punch cards.

 

[TripleHeinz]

Crucial M500/M550 SSDs in a mirrored array FTP (For The Paranoics).

 

[DataMedic]

I agree with USAFRet, multiple copies in multiple locations.

Keep in mind RAID is not backup, it's intended for uptime. The entire array (even a mirror array) can be corrupted all at the same time. Do a nightly backup onto a different device.

This article explains more about why RAID is not the same as backup: What is RAID?

 

[DataMedic]

And by the way, SSD's are traditionally more reliable than conventional hard drives especially inside of laptops. They will however cost you a fortune to recover the data from if they fail. So you still need a backup of anything important.

There's no getting around it. All data storage media will eventually fail - guaranteed.