120GB just isn’t enough
I mean, really. My hard disks in my desktop were less than 120GB for the longest while and that lasted me years. It blew my mind that I could really ever accumulate more than 80GB of data in a year. Well, it turns out everything is bigger these days. I guess it won’t be long before we’ll be equipping laptops with 1TB drives!
My poor little Macbook Pro actually ran out of disk space yesterday and it took most of the day to repair that. I’m running a whole host of applications and Parallels so I can run WinXP. I started deleting things, defragging, and rebooting the Mac a lot. What’s sort of stupid about OS X is how it really doesn’t do garbage cleanup on the disk until it absolutely has to. So even if you have like 10GB free, forget it! That will probably used for deleted files. And only when you reboot the computer does it decide to clean up all those deleted inodes. 
It took me a while to figure this out. It turns out that because I do a lot of photography that I create massively huge files! Sure, each photo might be 3-5 MB, but multiply that by 1000s and you get GB of data that gets moved around! Like, recently I was out at the Cherry Blossom Festival and I took 1,355 photos for something like 3.7GB. (I used up all 4 of my SD cards!) Crazy!
So, yeah, I’m a total mediaholic! And my poor little laptop drive just can’t keep up with it. I’m contemplating upgrading to a much much larger hard drive when I can! Of course that voids the Macbook warranty, so I don’t know if i want to tackle that right now.
It’s weird, I hear that Macbook owners can easily change their hard drives by tugging on a pull-tab near the battery. But, noooooooooooo, for Macbook Pro owners we have a wholly-inaccessible HDD compartment which requires popping the keyboard off! And lifting thin ribbon cables, etc. I remember when I replaced my other laptop’s HDD (after it had sort of gone south) and it wasn’t that bad. Unscrew the flap, take out the sleeve, disconnect the cables, reapply.
Anyways, so, I read up on Macbook article that showed how easy it was to swap in a new hard drive that could be bigger and faster. I think faster really is what I need, not necessarily larger. I do a lot of compiling code and photo processing, so anything to speed up the disk cache would help tremendously. My other laptop had the upgrade to a 7200 RPM drive which is probably why it felt really light and fast. 