My External Hardisk purchase experience

After lots of searching, reading reviews i bought a Western Digital Passport 80GB external USB hardisk. I thought of Lacie All- terrain rugged first, but later found that my Laptop didn't have a fireware 800 port (mine is fireware 400 :( ) to take advantage of Lacie's fireware interface for faster access times.
So i went to SP road here in Bangalore to buy a WD passport 80GB, easily found one @ Rs3000 /USD 77 inclusive of all taxes. Went home just to plugged in the disk, to my misery XP said "Power surge on USB port". i thought it might just a temporary problem, so tried again in other port. again same error!! tried on vista, other desktop, nothing helped!! the blue LED on the HD was blinking, no new drive on my laptop.
Time for some googling... i found out that there is some power problem with this ext. HD, many other HD's.Tried all solutions posted on various boards, instead ended up with the HD not even powering on now, the blue LED was gone. I decided to leave debugging there itslelf and get a replacement.
So got a replacement from WD service here in Bangalore on SP road within 2 days, and YAY this one works perfectly.