Best Storage/Price ratio of external harddrives and thumbdrives?

I am looking for really cheap hard drives and flash drives that can hold a lot which are of decent quality (won't break/lose my data/etc.)

The cheapest hard drives I could find were 100 dollar 500 GB drives...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...pr_product_top (110)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...MWBC686WWPQ710 (98)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...MWBC686WWPQ710 (110)

The best thumb drive I could find was an 80 (60 after rebate) 16 GB thumb drive...
http://www.amazon.com/Corsair-CMFUSB...986386&sr=8-12

Some other thumb drives were 40 dollar 8 gb, 20 dollar 4 gb, 10 dollar 2 gb. I'm looking for at least 4 GB, which is a lot of space for the type of stuff people put on thumbdrives (small videos, pictures, lots of documents). When I look at it, 4 GB would probably be enough for all my documents (homework and such), pictures, random files, and for some videos. But I am kind of leaning toward an 8 GB one just because I would be able to put more significant amounts of music and other stuff on it. They make 32 GB Flash drives, which are about twice as expensive as the 16 GB one (without rebate), and they also make 64 GB flash drives, but they are in the thousands for some reason. Of course I'm not going to get a 64 GB flash drive at that price, and of course I wouldn't get a flash drive for +100 bucks when I could easily get a small external hard drive.

Anyways, anyone have any suggestions, warnings, comments or anything?

depends what you're trying to do?
is this for everyday use, or backups?

If you're storing a lot of data over multiple drives, I'd seriously recommend some form of drive redundancy (so if one drive fails, you can just replace it and not lose any data)

I'm currently running 7x500Gb drives (in a Raid5) on my file server - that's 3 terabytes of storage

had 2 drives fail on me in 5 years and haven't lost any data, so redundancy's worth it's weight on gold

don't have that much knowledge on thumb drives
(I tend to just use the flash cards out of digital cameras, to be honest)

Generally for both everyday use and backups as well. I can't really afford to get more than one large drive though. I think for me, my two drives (my main computer one and the external one I'd buy) would be enough for "redundancy." One either one fails I would either get another one or fix it. Also, I might consider just getting an enclosure and an internal hard drive for a cheaper price and putting them together instead of buying a prebuilt external which is more expensive.

EDIT: thinking about it, I realize I really don't *need* 500GB. It's nice to have a ton of extra space, but my music at this point only takes up 30 GB... all my computer stuff usually doesn't take up more than like 50 GB. So thinking about it I think that I prefer a small, quiet, portable (not needed to be plugged in) external hard drive over a hunking jet engine sounding 500 GB thing. I know they make a lot of small, passport size external hard drives, which would be nice as well.

external hard drives are a con
as you said, just buy internal drives, and stick them in enclosures

I've found 500Gb is pretty much the best in terms of £ per Mb (at least where I am), although 750's are coming down in price now

*edit*
just seen your edit

Searching on newegg, I found an 8 GB flash drive for 26 dollars + shipping. I read that it probably wouldn't be able to handle abuse, but I could deal with that considering the great price. I am probably going to go with that one unless I can find a better deal.

Whether you pack it yourself or buy it premade, I would go for the bigger external. When I got mine maybe two years ago, more than quadrupling my storage capacity, I immediately started filling it with videos, pics and music at an accelerated rate, and now have to weed my files pretty regularly to maintain any space (my internal drive is almost entirely programs).

Increase available storage by multiples and your download habits will change.

I'm not an expert in external hard drives but I would assume the 500GB drives to be 2x250GB platters in the best case, but more likely 3x166GB. Considering that mainstream internal drives are out with 320 and 334 Gig designs, you might look out for one of those in external format since they offer much greater performance and 320GB seems to be a reasonably sized disk for you needs. Or just buy one of those and stick it in some sort of box. For 320GB I would recommend a Samsung F1 and for 640GB the Western Digital one is the overall winner. These drives offer greater performance than any 500 or 750. Both affordable and silent.