External Hard Drive

I am interested in purchasing a 500 GB External drive and I need some advice. I have checked out prices and other peoples' experiences and am a little confused. Could someone suggest a good drive? I am considering either Seagate or Western Digital. My main concern is that some people say that any drive will probably need formating to Windows 7. I installed the upgrade from Vista to 7. I have no experience with drives, so I need to know just how to format the drive if necessary. I only know that it must be formatted in NTFS. I have a 64 bit system. I guess that what I need is just a little education about how these things work and would especially like to know which brand has the best record.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Red

 

I have been using a 250GB Western Digital external HD for a few weeks and haven't had any problems. Formatting is quite easy and painless. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzXoqZTxl_Q This video is pretty much all it takes to format a hard drive within Windows 7 or Vista.

Hope this helps.

EDIT: Disregard their messages about syncing if you just want to use it for drag-and-drop storage or to install an operating system on it. Their software is nonessential, as an external HD is still the same as an internal. At least, that's what I've observed and been told.

EDIT 2: Partitioning works the same way, I found several helpful tutorials on partitioning hard drives on YouTube. That's what I used for mine.

 

Thank You for the information and Video. It seems simple, so maybe I'll get into it one day soon.
Red

 

You are quite welcome.

 

Yeah, I know what you mean. Any hard drive should be detected and function, but reformatting to NTFS (which it might very well already be.) might be good for optimization if you're going to use it exclusively with WinXP/Vista/Win7.

I dunno, that might just be complicating the issue. *shrug*