Buying a new portable HDD...

I always recommend buying a good internal HDD and then placing it in a quality external enclosure. That said, your requirement of not needing an external power supply puts the brakes on that.
Either way, I would recommend going with a Western Digital drive. If you do decide to go with an internal try and go with a Black edition and no less than Blue. The reviews for their Green edition drives are pretty dismal.

I have bought myself the Western Digital Elements SE [portable], its a nice small drive, 1 TeraByte in size. I'm making a copy of it and making it my main data drive, because of this i'm transferring at a rate of 12-14 mbps, is the transfer rate I should normally see when transferring from one external HDD [maxtor] to another external HDD [WD]. I'm transferring this with a HP G62 laptop [intel core i3 processor].

44GB remaining to transfer now cannot wait until its done.

Hey Dan, I vote with ferg on this one, as I am going to hot swap boxes and WD black caviar 1.5 TB drives (better price than the 2 T ). but not super portable though, and need a A/C plug

Cheers endo. Ah yeah I was also thinking of purchasing an internal disk and getting a caddy for it, but went with the 1TB WD instead. The transfer has completed now anyway. Getting 15mbp/s transferring to my old HDD on a different laptop, so I guessed its the kind of speeds I'll expect to see.

Hey Dan, I previously used WD external drives. Spoke with a hardware engineer from WD, he says the WD badged ext drives are quite poor quality (they did not even make green grade). The only good ones are the black series (and best purchased from Dell computers---they are willing to pay top $$$ for them--- and best quality too).

The black series stil have a 5 year warranty.

Amazon had a black caviar 2 T for 140 USD and a 1.5 for 100 USD, so endo is going for the 1.5's


Cheers Dan