Buying an external Hard Drive

I have a hp personal media drive

Western Digital or LaCie all the way.
Or Kingston (I don't know if they do HDD's but their flash drives are awesome).
Freecom is a big no no though, I've had loads of 'em and they tend to overheat or get really fragile in transport. On the other hand, I've had a LaCie Big Disk II for a yearish now and it's been absolutely fine.

http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?pid=11023

I would go with that. Little more than some but they take a good bash i can say that now. We have some at school and i have dropped them and all sorts still going strong after 3 years.