these are slick - cool colors - but i'm lookin' for more bang fer mah buck, like 500gb for $100 at 7200rpm with great reviews... seagate's freeagent apparently has some problems according to some amazon reviews or i'd be all over that

#1, this is a 2.5" drive, not a 3.5" drive. 500gb 2.5" drives hover in the $300 region.

btw, i own the 160gb version of the seagate go version. Works well for me. I prefer that to this but I think this is pretty much a decent price for the portable version.

the 320gb drives are 25 bucks more at Fry's...

how are these drives for large file transfer, 1-5gb?

Tranfer rates on these are limited by the USB, not the drive itself. You'd not want to use USB1.1, but with the now standard USB2 it does as well as any externally USB connected drive or device.

Alot depends on what you are copying, though....a 1 gig file will copy much faster than 1024 1 meg files. I've found them to be reasonable for straight copying, as well as for Ghost or Acronis type backups.