hey there, i would suggest "building" your own external harddrive... it has a few advantages, for one if you ever get a desktop you can remove the harddrive from your external enclosure and put it inside your desktop, and if you ever have
more then one internal harddrive you can swap them out of your case (for example your desktop breaks and you left important documents on your harddrive, you can take the harddrive out and put it in your external case and access those files)....

i made a 300GB setup for like $120 about 2-3 years ago, and harddrives have dropped in price alot since then...

heres links to what i got for comparison.
Newegg.com - Open Box: Maxtor MaXLine III 7V320F0 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
i had a slightly older model with only 300 GB, and this has 320 for way cheaper then mine was! This is also SATA which is currently the cutting edge for harddrives. (WAY faster then IDE and ATA)

Here is a list of external enclosures... i would personally get a SATA harddrive with an external enclosure that supports both SATA and IDE (but you really only need SATA, but having both options is always nice)
Newegg.com - Buy Computer Parts, PC Components, Laptop Computers, Digital Cameras and more!

as far as installing it, all you have to do it plug in the harddrive (easy as plugging in a power could) and plug the USB in the laptop, the laptop should detect it automatically...

as far as formatting your harddrive, i would suggest FAT32 for compatibility, This will allow you to use your harddrive on nearly every system, windows, mac, linux, your xbox (ask if you want to know )

hope this helps,
Raelum:smokin: