I've heard some bad things about Lacie too, although the film academy in Belgium (one of them) only works with Lacie drives.
And I've bought a 250 gigabyte external HDD from Lacie, triple interface, about 3 years ago, that I use as a backup (not constantly in use, although sometimes it is) and it still hasn't failed me.
Heard great things about seagate too, but I thought Lacie used Seagate drives in them?

Rather than buying someones bundled product with their markup, do the direct thing and start using eSATA drives. These avoid the latency of USB and Firewire bridging and you can always take the drive and mount it directly in a computer if you wish. eSATA is a slim, shielded version of the standard SATA cable so there are no electronics to the case at all. Later this year will be a move for "power over eSATA" so the computer powers the drive directly, no separate power cord at all. If you have a spare SATA port on your desktop, simple bulkhead connecter is often provided with the case. If you have a notebook with a PCMCIA or ExpressCard slot there is a card for that. If you have a spare PCI on your desktop, there is a card for that too.