I ended up buying this 500 GB external hard drive by LaCie:
Apparently they partnered with F. A. Porsche for the design (the words "Design by F. A. Porsche" are even engraved on the side of the case) which might be a selling point for some but I don't really see what the big deal is. The design is simple, the lines are clean and it has a nice matte silver case but it's nothing a regular design firm (or even a recent industrial design grad) couldn't come up with.
The main selling point for me was price. The drive usually retails for $320 but I got it on sale at Future Shop (the Canadian Best Buy) for $120 which really isn't a bad price for half a terabyte of storage.
I'll finally have enough space for my files without having to resort to the stop-gap solution of burning a bunch of DVDs. Plus there's the added bonus of being able to use the drive with my laptop while I'm traveling.
It was über easy to set-up since it's USB 2.0 it's pretty much plug 'n' play although I did have to reformat it from the default FAT 32 to NTFS for better compatibility with Windows XP.
