I would say..

Go for a Seagate drive, or something with a Samsung drive inside. Hitachi have a history of breaking down. I'm sure they are better now, but most techy types seem to avoid them.

I'm not sure about software, but there should be plenty to chose from, assuming you don't want to manually copy things across (which is what I do). As for them being easy to use, all the drives will just plug in with minimum setting up. It's only the software that will be different, and that can be downloaded for free if you don't like the bundled program

I'd also stay away from Currys/PCWorld. Ebuyer have a Seagate External drive for 80 quid that is twice as big as the one you linked to:

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Posted By: scruffy, Mar 13, 12:24:32