I've got a Seagate USB 120 Gb external at the house and two at the office and if I leave any of them on for over two hours they begin to sound like coffee grinders and the one at the house has been reformatted twice.  You know what that means: loss of massive amounts of data, including the final version of my Masters' Thesis.

I know that, in theory, it should be possible...I've just never been able to get an external USB hard drive to live up to its advertising copy.  Maybe it's because I expect it to...well, do what they say it should do?

I'm using mine now exclusively for backup storage.  I hope to one day have a USB/Firewire HD that I can trust that is affordable.