I personally use seagate barracuda hard drives but i don't think it really matters that much, just personal preference really. I'm pretty sure most hard drives will be lockable. You will need to lock your hard drive so that you can disable your mod chip to play on live. Although you could just use xbconnect instead of live as that will allow you to play without disabling your chip.
I personally use isocraxtion to make an iso of my games then alcohol 120% to burn. Again, this is personal preference (I think AXMichigan prefers the data burn method but i'm not too sure
) and if you search this forum (sticky's first) you will find tutorials on different methods people use.
I use ritek go4 dvd-r media for all my backups aswell.