Suggestions for a dependable storage drive

For years, I've been buying WD MyBooks because of their low cost, but I recently found out that when the enclosure fails, your data is gone. I have eight of them, and many are currently not mounting and aren't showing up at all in Disk Manager.

Could anyone please suggest a dependable storage drive with a large capacity? I work in video, so I need a lot of backup space.

I'm running Windows 11 Pro, version 25H2 (Build 26200.8655) on an Intel i9-14900K with 192 GB of RAM.

Thanks!

Honestly if you want reliability I would suggest looking at a NAS and configuring it in a RAID 5,6 or 10 (1+0) for a more durable storage system. I do a fair amount of photography and keep everything on a 20TB NAS in a 1+0 config.

Thank you for your reply! I purchased a WD NAS MyCloudMirror many years ago and it became inaccessible within a month. What brand have you found to be dependable? The thing that bothers me most about RAID is that even with redundancy, if your controller fails, all is lost, so for redundancy, I just buy drives two at a time and back up the data to both. But if the brand you use is dependable, they maybe their non-RAID drives are also, so I'd be interested in knowing the brand you trust. Thanks!

QNAP or Synology are the brands I would recommend.

Thank you, but these look more like business server solutions. I'm just a freelance video artist, not a large business.

They have NAS geared for home users up to larger business geared arrays. You certainly will pay a premium for the "easy-to-setup" systems but you get the reliability.

These are very easy to setup options geared toward home users
Synology DS225+ for a 2 bay (You could do a RAID 1) or
Synology DS1525+ for a 4 bay (RAID 5 or 6 or a 1+0)

That's a very good suggestion, but a little steep in price for me unfortunately. I agree you, though, it's a good way to go.
What if the controller fails, can you put the drives in another housing and read them up?

In most cases yes the drives will still function with data in-tack.

Disclaimer: I don't use any external drives for online storage.

I wonder whether you'd prefer a DAS (direct attached storage)?

If you only need to access it from a single PC, it may be a simpler choice.

As to whether you could transfer RAID disks to another NAS or DAS, I don't know. A little Web searching suggests that it should work, although it could be a little fussy: same exact enclosure, same firmware version, disks in the same physical order.

I trust you're aware that RAID reduces capacity as the price of error correction. RAID 10 has half the total capacity of the disks. (I assume they're all the same size. You'd need an even number.) With N disks in RAID 5, the capacity is N-1.

Disks have gone up in price a lot recently. In late 2022, I bought an 18TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro drive for $300. In 2023, I bought a 16TB version for $250.

Yes, I do prefer to keep it simple with DAS. I see online that you need the external bay setup to use them, but if you're not using them exteral, does that mean you have them directly in your computer like a DAS drive? Sorry if that's a dumb question.