faster but much more expensive, as you found out with your 500 gig drive.

You can get a handful of terabytes for what you spend on one SSD. I have an old Seagate 350MB external drive that holds most of my files, and that's backed up to another Seagate 1 TB and a 2TB WD drive. Almost 3 1/2 TB for $150 bucks or so.

And then there's that cloud. Flickr, Dropbox, Onedrive, Google drive, Evernote and a bunch of places to store stuff.

But expensive.
It did breathe new life into my PC.

I am looking at a Seagate Barracuda 3 TB.

https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-BarraCuda-3-5-Inch-Internal-ST1000DM010/dp/B01IEKG4NE/ref=pd_lpo_vtph_147_lp_t_2?_encoding=UTF8&refRID=5FSP3N7Y95CJ6AQHN21Q&th=1

if your stuff is that valuable, regularly switch between drives so one is unplugged if your system goes down.

A handful of terabytes is useless.

Most people in my experience use less than 60 gigs of drive space.

Overbuying storage serves no purpose whatsoever. For that same $150 you could get three years of unlimited storage with a service like carbonite that is a much better backup anyway since it is off site and would protect you in the case of a burglary or fire or other natural disaster.

Given the average hard drive life is 3-4 years in the end you might save yourself a dollar or two going with an external but should a disaster hit your house all that extra storage would be for naught anyway.

If you have security concerns, encrypt the entire drive or just the particular sensitive files. I'd stick with the major brand drives (Samsung, WD, Toshiba, Seagate, HGST), though I think there has been some consolidation in the drive market in recent years.