Question as to which brand of hard disc drive I should get.

I am getting an External USB harddrive so I can transfer large amounts of data between my linux box and my windows XP box, and also use it for backup.

Plan is to get a 250gig hard drive, partition it into 5 or 6 partitions all as FAT format so that both operating systems can see them, and put stuff on and transfer as needed.

HDD needs to be durable, so I avoid failure, not necessarily fast.

Friend of mine suggests getting Seagate brand as opposed to Western Digital brand. Does anybody have any thoughts as to which is the better quality?

Thanks,

Moxieman

If you ask 5 persons about their prefered hard disk manufacutrer you will probably get 5 different answers.
The warranty period may be an indicator though. Hard disks with a 5 year warranty should usually last at least five years otherwise it would be really expensive for the manufacturer after a while.
I have used lots of Maxtor hard disks (from 345 MB to 500 GB) and never had a failure.
You can usually buy an external case and an ordinary hard disk and put that in the case yourself or buy an external hard disk where the hdd itself is already installed in the case. The first option is usually cheaper and you can choose which hdd to put in the case.

Very true, I won't try and tell you which is better but I'll share some experiences that are actually directly opposite to what you're mate told you

I personally have had 1 Seagate drive (200GB) crap out on me and a friend who is a storage freak and runs a local LAN has lost 4 (!!!) Seagate drives. On his recommendation I've since only every used Western Digital and he does the same and neither of us have had any problems. This guy is like my hardware knowledge base because he sees so many computers through the LAN, I can name a brand and ask if he's heard any stories of them being good or bad. So far I've had a good run with this method, fingers crossed