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!

Okay, you said appearance isn't very important.

Buy an enclosure-less SATA/PATA to USB adapter cable for $15 USD and use any internal hard drive you want, sitting on your desk bare-to-the-air, with no active cooling.  Mine came with a 3.5" to 2.5" ATA/power adapter as well, so I can go between desktop and laptop drives easily.  Swap drives in 5 seconds instead of 30.  No lights.  You can even use the adapter to connect an internally-mounted hard drive via USB if your existing drive controllers are full and you can't (or don't want to) add more.

I was the only one using these in my IT dept. at my last job when everyone else was wasting time with enclosures, thumb drives, or shutting down and going straight to the motherboard.  By the time I quit to work at a better job, everyone else had req'd their own.

As a bonus, these adapters come with portable AC-to-Molex power supplies (5V + 12V) that you can use for other things when not using the adapter.  I repurposed one of these to daisy-chain a few silent 120 mm fans at the back of my home theater rack, to draw heat away from some of my hotter equipment.

One more thing you could do (if you really needed an enclosure-like system with active cooling) is to use one of these adapters in conjunction with a removable drive rack.  I have done this with the FMI aluminum racks and trays that CompUSA sells.  The stock fans on these particular units are loud, but can be replaced with Scythe Mini Kaze 40 mm fans (or the equivalent silent Papst fan that might be better available in Europe) for better noise and cooling.  Anyway, the advantage with this is that you can buy additional trays and put each of your drives in its own tray for quick swapping.

Lastly, as for drives, a HD501LJ will be quiet enough without the slight noise dampening that an enclosure would provide.  Bare on the desk would work great.  Just make sure that, if you go with an enclosure-less adapter, the adapter is SATA-compatible.   Older ones, such as the first one I ever bought, aren't.