Question about drives for bulk storage

Hello help desk,

I'm putting a PC together but I ask for some wisdom on certain things.

I would like to pair of drives in my system for bulk data storage, vacation photos, documents, home videos etc. but not like cinema or TV shows.

Are SSDs the way to go in 2025? Does having the drives in RAID 1 matter?

The system doubles as our HTPC so it's turned on pretty much every day.