As far as burning reliability goes . . . SCSI is better than IDE, and external is better than internal. You get just about what you pay for.
Sony, Yamaha, Plextor, and HP are all good in that department.
I find USB connections are still somewhat on-again/off-againish to ring my chimes. IEEE 1394 is better . . . but that is still limited in availability of hardware. Sony has one I believe, and the camcorder/video capture people speak highly of it.