You don't mention which computer/OS system you are using, but if you are using a Mac then I can thoroughly recommend the Smartdisk FireLite. It uses a firewire which is only marginally slower than USB2. The disc is preformatted to HFS+ but can be altered to FAT32 or NTFS if you desire (I haven't bothered as HFS+ is recommended for the Mac OSs)
I tried a Lacie and USB2 but it just would not mount so returned it for this Smartdisk Firelite which is simplicity itself.