A Seagate external HD is a way to go. I went through 2 different 500 gig Western Digital Externals before giving up on them and switching to Seagate. I bought a 1 TB for about $150.00 and have no problems with it yet.

However anything is prone to damage and loss. As I mentioned above I went through those two WD HD's in only 3 years time. Data could have been retrieved but a huge cost. If your only saving family photos a internet Cloud Save is good. Heck even making a private Photobucket account works for those too. If it is a lot of private / personal information / data / pictures then the External HD is the way to go. The bigger the better. 1 or 2 Tera-bite HD's are great. Plus with a large size they do not have to constantly overlay deleted data for storage space.