Recommend Hard Drive for Audio recording?

[mikeshep]

Hi, I've been out of the buying market for hardware for awhile and just need
some good recommendations of a dependable external Hard Drive to be used
in my recording studios for a large audio restoration project:

I have a vast amount of material archived on cassettes and open-reel analog
tape which I need to transfer into the digital domain (Imac) and in turn,
convert/burn the material to discs.

This involves real-time record of the audio to one of my audio software apps,
then temporarily storing the digitized audio on one or more external HDs.
Ideally I'd simply save it all to Hard Drive and leave it at that but i'm looking at
ultimately hundreds of hours of audio so likely will be more practical to burn the
digitized audio to discs and then clear the HD space for new record and transfer.

The bottom line question is - what would be a suitable firewire external drive -
say 500GB - ideally in the $100 or less ballpark that will be up to this type of task.

Seagate, WD, LaCie seem to come up best rated in general.

I guess it doesn't matter to me if the drive is "portable" per se but it needs to
be an External with its own enclosure. I think 5400 speed is ok.

Also, for use as an external drive to be recorded-to, are there any good under-$100
portable FW interface drive recommendations? I need something for a laptop to use
when on the road for location -recording and my software mfgr recommends an
external HD as the volume to be recorded-to, with the host application located on the
internal HD. Exactly why, I don't know but, this is the software-mfgr recommendation.

Thanks for your help (and taking time to read all of this; )

Mike