External USB HDD

I'm looking for an external HDD to use with my laptop. Key citeria: Lots of storage, silent operation, cool operation. Exactly the stuff you'd want if you left your laptop running all night long for extended periods of time just to check /. each morning just after you've woken up ... you get the point. Furthermore, no irritating lights, please! My room is already illuminated brightly enough by dozens of erratically blinking LEDs from diverse networking and telecommunication equipment (luckily enough, I've been able to avoid glaring blue LEDs so far) as well as life-support systems (I just NEED coffee). Ideally, an adjustable illumination would be great, so I can have 70's Italo Disco when I want to wake up and nothing but darkness when I want to sleep.
Perhaps the most important point of all: The price tag. EUR 100 to EUR 120 is what I'm willing to pay for.
I'd be glad if the equipment I'm about and willing to buy featured some longer-than-1-year warranty. HDD makers usually offering 3 to 5 years and then sticking to just one on their external products don't really get my trust in terms of reliability--the products might be quiet and cheap, but this just destroys the drives due to lack of decent cooling.

I've looked at several products so far, but the competition is amazing, so I've got no clue where to start.
I'm not fixed on pre-built drives, as I--lo and behold!--posess a series of screwdrivers ALL ON MY OWN and I am WILLING TO USE THEM! Ahem.

Seagate's FreeAgent (orange!) Desktop series seems to look nice, apart from the incredibly ugly design (which is not of great concern, anyway), featuring a 5-year warranty and no obvious screaming miniature fans. The 500 GiB model is just about 120 Euros. Does anyone know if it's really quiet and cool? Can the lighting be turned off?

Alternative suggestions are very welcome!

>>8
If I'm not feeling extremely bad, I prefer sleeping when it's dark without having lights glaring my eyes.

>>6
I'm living in a small to medium sized town (~45K) in Germany featuring a plethora (read: one) of overexpensive electronics retailers with a product selection that makes you cringe.
The other towns or small cities in the vincinity don't look anything better.

Of course, I could just buy a product that looks okay from amazon, try it and if I don't like it, send it back (by German law, there's a 14-day trial period for products you bought over the internet, telephone or mail-order), but this is not only a big hassle, but also somehow stupid.
Be it as it may, I'll have to get the stuff online, as S+H costs are far less than actually buying it here.

As for compromizing noise for capacity, this is totally okay in this case. I've had fairly bad experience with poorly cooled drives, so heat is an issue, too.
The pre-built boxes only feature a one-year warranty, making me figure they're literally roasting their drives inside, praying they'll fail not before one year in operation ... great.

The external cases to put a decent HDD in I've come across so far on my quest to find the best solution are either ridiculously expensive or these extremely cheap things where they would even have made the wires from plastic if this were possible.
Other cases include the perforated-side models from raidsonic and their respective ripoffs, which I'm not too keen buying--cooling might be nice, but noise-wise, it's just like having the drive sit directly in front of you (I know this first-hand, as some of my friends have these cases--they're not bad for the occasional user or the noise-ignorant folks, but they're just too noisy for me).
So far, I haven't found anything with big aluminum fins on the side promising great cooling and low noise (this is, in fact, what I was looking for before I opened this thread, but because I couldn't find any, I figured this just didn't exist)--as you mentioned this,  do you maybe know some models meeting these criteria?

As for the drive to put inside, I'd get a Seagate or Samsung--500 GiB seems to be a nice capacity.