External hard drive for a Mac newbie

I've paged through the external hard drive thread, but I've got some conflicting data, so I was hoping someone could offer advice.

I have two Dell notebooks and I'm going to get rid of one and get a Macbook. I'm also going to do the memory/hard drive upgrades.

I need a good external hard drive, something around 500GB, that I can use for a) general backup for my other notebook and the macbook, b) the upgrades on the Macbook when I first get it, and c) the transfer of files from my old pc to the new macbook. It looks like Lacie has some models that would do the job, but a lot of people on the other thread seemed to have problems with Lacie.

Anyone have any advice or experience here? Many thanks - I'm not real good at this kind of thing, but I'm REAL sick of my pc and looking for something better.

I really like my Lacie Porsche 500GB model. I abuse the bajeezus out of it and it keeps working.

I have a lacie 500gb drive hooked to my mini. This houses all my video files, itunes stuff, and other multimedia files. My only concern with this drive in particular is that it has two 250gb drives driven by a proprietary raid controller. So if one drive dies, I'll probably lose everything. This worries me, but so far (9 months of continuous usage) its been fine, just annoying when it has to spin up both hard drives from sleep mode.

I've had good experiences with lacie, but iomega has also been great. I would recommend you find one with both firewire and USB2. USB will work with your PC fine, and I tend to see greater reliability and consistency with firewire connections with my macs, but that's just been my experience.