2. Western Digital MyBook Studio Edition II 4TB

• My Book Studio Edition...
• • Dell Home
  • $499.99
• • B&H Photo-Video
  • $449.00
• • CDW.com
  • $449.99
• • sgra5055
  • $619.98

$649.99

If the dad in your life is head-of-household in the sense that he collects, hoards, and manages his family’s digital loot, we think he could get some use out of a 4TB external storage solution. Western Digital’s latest effort comes pre-formatted for Mac (and lots of dads do run the family multimedia operation off of an Apple machine), but includes directions for re-formatting it for PC (though keep in mind that Windows XP can only recognize a maximum of 2TB external storage). Any way you slice it, though, this capacity represents a lifetime of storage for the even the most prolific of family photographers and videographers.

When used in its standard RAID 0 configuration (which improves drive speed and performance but doesn’t make your data failsafe), the drive can hold up to 1.14 million photos, 300 hours of video, or 1 million songs.  Alternatively, you can configure the device for RAID 1, which halves the capacity but protects your data better. Either way, you can format half the capacity for Mac, and half for Windows, if you like. And if you do have a Mac, this is one of the few drives that is compatible with Apple Time Machine—that fancy auto-backup feature that comes with the Mac operating system. Alternatively, if you don’t have a Mac, WD throws in its own auto-backup software, which we happen to really like (http://www.tomsguide.com/us/westerndigital-mybook-worldedition,review-1200-5.html).

If you have an eSATA connection in your machine, you can connect to the eSATA port on the back of the MyBook for blazing speed. And if you’ve got a machine with FireWire 800 or 400, you’re also covered. For the rest of us, we’ll make do with USB 2.0

WD backs this product with a five year warranty, and if your dad wants to use this as a digital safe for a lifetime’s worth of memories, he should find that reassuring.