So one thing I did not see mentioned here is, what are you recording? If you are recording 2 or 4 tracks at a time, recording to an HDD should not be a problem. But if you are recording a full band, with 8 mics on the drums alone, and have 16 or 24 tracks recording simultaneously, I would want to record to an SSD.
As
@fractalz says above, backups should be both local and remote. My routine is, one copy of files (that I care about) on main drive in main computer. Second copy on external drive. Third copy in remote location. The remote location one is critical so do NOT ignore that one. Reason being, if the building your computer and external drives reside in burns down, you are left with nothing. The remote location version will be safe from such a catastrophe.
I have been using M.2 drives since 2015 I believe, and before that I used the "Revo Drive" that utilized the graphic card slots on the computer (which the M.2 drives do as well). The big advantage to M.2 drives is, both SSD and HDD plug into what is known as SATA ports. Those SATA ports (in their current version) support only 6 GB/s data transfer. The PCI graphic slots (than and M.2 plugs into) can support up to I believe 32 GB/s. So the part of the computer they are connecting to is over 5 times faster. If you have a SSD drive that can read and write at 8 GB/s, but it is hooked up to a SATA port, you will get a maximum of 6 GB/s even though the drive could move data faster if it had a highway big enough to do so.
I have a M.2 devoted to OS and program installs with a lot of extra space to use when I need it. I then have all plugins, sample libraries, etc. on SSD drives. I also record to the SSD drives (I don't need more than the 6 GB/s that the SATA ports provides for the recording as I am doing at max, 8 simultaneous record channels). Then all backups are on HDD drives both external and remote. I don't like cloud services, so I make a backup once a year and send the external drive to my mom's house, and she puts it in a safe there, so that is my remote backup.
Best of luck with the new box and note that you may be able to recover the data from your old box! I would even be willing to help you do that if you would like. The process would involve taking the hard drive out of the old box and putting it in an external reader (then shipping it to me if you wanted me to try and recover it). If the hard drive is still working, the data is still there. Now if your computer failed because the hard drive went bad, then it is a whole different process, but can still be recovered via data recovery services. PM me if you want an assist on any of that!
