looking for an external hard drive

wanting to buy an external hard drive 300 gb and just wanted some expert opinions on brand quality. Seagate, Maxtor, and Western Digital are the one's I have been looking at. There are others, but not within my price range. Just need some ideas from real world users, not the magazine type reviews. Thanks, in advance, for anybody's suggestions.

 

I buy cases from cooldrives.com and put whatever drive I like in them.. plus you can upgrade your drive when bigger ones come out. I have bought several cases, this one my latest.

Just give you more options: USB, IEEE, IDE, SATA the possibilites are 'endless'

 

This one seems to be a good one..nice price too. tho I tdon't have any myself, i guess if i were looking for one.. i would pick this:
http://www.pricegrabber.com/p__Maxtor_OneTouch_2_E01H300_External_300GB_Hard_Drive,__6693154

 

thanks for the info. thought about doing the internal drive with a case, but seems like I really wouldn't be saving that much money. still just looking, but appreciate the responses. as a side question, is there much of a difference in the data transfer rate between an internal and external drive?

 

i dont know exacts, but im sure SATA (internal) is faster than usb, but firewire might be closer?

 

well, had a sale at fry's so I bought a seagate 300 gb external drive for $70.00 and a combo case for another 40. put it together while the rain came down. now I'll see how it does when I get back to colorado. have to figure out about formatting, partitioning and all that other hi-tech stuff when I get it hooked up. will just have to see what happens. going to use it mainly for storing video and photos and have been told to use firewire as the hookup rather than usb. anyway I'll let you all know how it works out. appreciate all the information. hope it was a pretty good buy.