I'm looking to pick up a 500GB external hard drive. I'm pretty sure the PC it will be connected to can do both firewire and USB, but definitely USB (pretty sure the mobo has firewire ports on the back, but as I've never owned any device that used firewire, they may not work, for all I know). I'll be moving my current desktop into a closet and using it as a media server running Vista Home Premium, and just docking my new ThinkPad tablet PC at my desk as my new primary machine. I want a large storage device I can hang off of the media server for backup (of multiple machines including the media on the media server) and network storage purposes. Ideally, I'd like to spend under $200, but for quality and reliability I'd be willing to spend more. I've read appallingly bad things about Seagate and Western Digital. I'm more optimistic about Buffalo from some things I've read, but I don't know too much about them (they seem like a fairly recent entrant into the wireless networking and external drive markets?). I've used external USB enclosures with spare drives, but they're generally too noisy and the drives I've had lying around were old and near death anyway, not the best reliability.


Any recommendations?