External Hard drives – recommendations please?

I have a desktop and a laptop at home – XP based. I want to back up data, most important are the digital photos collected over the years, to external hard disks; that I could place in a fire-safe box.

As the combined data storage from my two machines exceeds 500GB, I was thinking of buying two external HDD – not as a redundancy measure but thought it be better than buying one 1TB HDD.

I was looking at a Seagate piece – called FreeAgent at Best Buy. It is priced at $169.xx.

Any other place or brand to buy?

Reliability and size matters to me more than the speed.

Thoughts or recommendations are appreciated!!!