Portable Hard Drives

[saysun]

I've been doing a lot of research on which portable hard drive I should buy. I want to back up and store stuff from my PC, but I want the ease of being able to carry around the back-up hard drive with me. I have read that the USB 2.0 drives are good, but recently I read that Firewire is better and faster and more reliable than just USB. I saw some combination drives but now want to know which are the best: Lacie, Western Digital, Seagate, Smalldrives, Ondago, Cooldrives, Pocketec, or Smartdisk. I like the Smartdisk, mostly because it has a LED screen so you can see what's been backed up from your PC to the external drive. I also want affordability (120 gigs for under 90 pounds) but I also want something that's going to work every time and is easy to use, and also looks good and is small enough to fit in my pocket or purse. Any ideas? Any value in buying the combination drive (firewire and USB) or staying with just USB powered drives.

[fo3nix]

If you have a Mac, get firewire. If you have a PC, get either firewire or USB.

LaCie and Maxtor are the brands of my two drives; both I find to be great.

firewire is slightly faster (and firewire800 significantly if you have the ports), but for portability and to make it more useful I'd get USB -- you probably won't notice the difference unless you back up a few very large files.