Whats the best (name brand) external hard drive?

I'm looking for a new external hard drive to back up my generic external hard drive which is making funny noises and is screaming to be put out of its misery. It has to be at least 120GB but if there is a must buy that is more I'd definitely get that instead. At the local chain stores there are plenty of Seagate (what I was thinking of originally), Maxtor (what the salespeople were pushing) and of course western digital which looks like the Sony of hard drives. I don't really need any special features except usb 2.0 capabilities. The 'one touch' capabilities are nice but since they take forever to back up and since I only have about 20 GB on my main computer its kind of unnecessary.

Can anybody give me there recommendations on what they have seen and heard. I have checked the online marketplace store customer reviews however they are all over the place (as with all electronics) and its been known that competitors often have negative reviews posted for rival products. There does not seem to be a general consensus on which is the best and I'm looking now since I have some extra christmas money.

Oh yeah, can anybody tell me why people convert their external hard drives from FAT32 to NTSC??? or whatever it was. I read about that in another post but just skimmed it at the time. Since I remember that you can only do that in your initial setup of the hard drive I was interested in that to. Thanks for the help and happy holidays!

 

is the maxtor fan and additional accessory? Obviously an 7200 rpm hard drive is optimal. Are there certain models of maxtor that work better than others. Do the 'one touch' features take forever to back up every single file on the computer or only new ones?

Also about that NTFS, is there a program that I need to download in order to configure it this way. There must be some drawbacks to this formatting otherwise it would be standard right? Just playing devils advocate.