Advice request - which external HDD for Adobe Lightroom?

Hi,
I'm going to buy myself an external hdd this week, and I would be very grateful for your advice.
1) I'm shooting with Nikon D70, Canon A520, and my mobile(;]).
2) After over 1 year of shooting I have ~130GB of photos taken with these cameras + I have some negative from analog times, which I'm going to scan (I estimate them to be next ~20GB)
3) I would like to keep all of above photos on external hdd and import them into Abobe Lightroom (tagging + developing), and and of course apply retouching to some of them in PS CS2.
4) My computers are : old PC desktop with XP, on which I will be only viewing these pictures, and IBM T43 with Vista on which I'm going to do all the developing. [Yes, I know that Apple is better, and I love Apple, but I can'tafford one yet].
Given above assumptions, which external hdd from the ones I've preselected should I choose ? I'm on the budget here, and the ones that I can afford are :
WD My Book Pro 250GB USB 2.0/FireWire400/FireWire800 16MB Cache
WD My Book Premium 320GB USB 2.0/FireWire400 8MB Cache
WD My Book Essential 500GB USB2.0 8MB Cache
LaCie Porsche 500GB USB 2.0 8MB Cache
I'm asking mainly because I don't have any idea about how fast should a drive be to work with Lightroom with decent speed.
Also : should I buy FireWire controller for my T43 laptop, or will USB 2.0 be enough for my purposes ?
Thanks in advance for sharing your experience.
Chris

>Yes, I know that Apple is better, and I love Apple, but I can't afford one yet
Either a PC or MAC is fine, but you've entered a field where affordability is proportional to the number of photos you manage, the type of processing you perform and the level of security you are comfortable with. This is entirely separate of your budget.
USB2 and/or Firewire Drives work fine. From your list, I've owned both the LaCie Porsche and a WD MyBook. They both failed for different reasons. All hard drives will eventually fail. If you can't afford to lose your photo library you need some sort of redundency. The reliability of that redundency (RAID) and or speed of retrieval determines what technology is the minimum you need to afford. Or, if you have more time than budget, you can archive on DVDs. Keep in mind that even DVD's will fail over time.
The faster the drive, the faster the backup (redundency), the faster the throughput, and the faster you have access to managing and processing your image library.
Did I answer your question: No. However, whatever you get, and assuming you value your photos, make sure you get two of them so you can build some redundency into your budget. If you're feeling lucky, get the largest drive you can afford and make sure you leave yourself a lot of time for those backups.
Welcome to "photo shoebox management" of the new millenium! It ain't cheap ... :-)

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HFS+ ((((MAC FORMAT)))) (Hierarchical File System, a.k.a. Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Don't use case-sensitive)
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EXFAT (FAT64)
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exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table)
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