Hey all

I haven't really posted on this forum much, maybe not at all even, but a few of you might remember me from back in the days of LWS. Hopefully some of you who are more technologically inclined can help me find a good hard drive...

I don't know as much as I'd like to about computers and/or hard drives, but wanted an external HD somewhere between 500 GB - 1 TB. I'd like to be able to plug it into my desktop and my laptop via USB, and just want to use it to store music/movies/pictures.

I've read that you can just buy an internal hard drive and then buy a case for it to make it external... is this a cheaper option? I also want it to be as physically compact as possible, so would buying an internal+case be more pragmatic in that sense? If not, is there a specific kind of external hard drive I should be looking for (things like '32 mb cache' don't mean much to me, so if somebody could explain what that means as well...) I was browsing around amazon and similar websites, and found that some are listed as "desktop hard drives." Does this mean that they are only compatible with desktop computers?

Ideally, I don't want to spend more than 100 dollars total. I'm not in that big of a rush so I am willing to wait a few weeks if it means that I can find a better deal.

Along with the aforementioned questions, I'd also like to know what some good websites are to browse around. Would it be unwise for me to buy this from sites like ebay/craigslist? I've heard amazon and newegg are pretty good... any other suggestions? Is buying online a good idea, or would I be able to find similar prices at stores like best buy as well? I'm also hoping someone can point me in the right direction of specifically what kind of hard drive / casing I should get, since I have virtually no experience with this kind of thing. If it makes any difference, my laptop is a Windows Vista and my desktop is a Windows XP. Any help/suggestions are appreciated, thanks!