I have heard some not so great things about those WD Studio externals (check out the apple support forums), not because of the actual disks themselves, but the enclosures. I looked at buying one too but the feedback from people worried me. Personally I think their actual disks are great, I have about 4 of them in various computers. LaCie is relatively good, but people often give them mixed reviews these days.
What I do myself is just buy the disk and enclosure separately. I just recently bought a MacPower Pleaides Super S Combo and stuck a WD 500GB SATA drive in there for time machine. The Macpower enclosure uses an Oxford chipset which is the best for firewire on a mac. Not cheap but my data security is worth it. Epowermac has this enclosure on special for $129, normally about $180. Also buying a separate enclosure means that you can be sure what disk you are getting inside and what chipset the enclosure uses. The other advantage is that you can open it up without voiding the warranty. This is super useful if you are troubleshooting whether the enclosure or the disk itself has failed. Also it also allows you to remove and use the disk internally if you ever need to.
And with noise, basically any modern SATA drive is pretty quiet these days, especially as they all use fluid bearings now, and there is a much higher demand on the market for quiet drives. Obviously laptop drives are much quieter again.
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