I've been looking at external harddrives, too. My brother told me to stay away from some knockoff brand named Asian Electronics, but other than that, I have no clue.

On the WinRar front: this happened to me. You may have already tried this, but in case not, right click on the folder you want to compress, choose "Add to archive", then, when the WinRar dialog box pops up, choose "zip" instead of "rar" as file type. It's a button option. I can get it to compress to zips that way, but no other combo of clicking will work. Arrrrrrrgh.