Okay, so I'm having a little bit of a strange crisis at the moment. I've noticed lately that Remiel, my 2006-era MacBook Pro, has been slo-o-o-o-owing do-o-o-own. The spinny pinwheel of death has been appearing more and more frequently, and the poor little guy just ain't what he used to be. Loading my email takes forever, as does loading applications. When I approached my friend Mike about it, he groaned and said that he'd seen those symptoms before. He suggested that maybe I was nearing a catastrophic hard drive failure.

Frak.

Okay, so maybe I need a new hard drive. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - the beastie only has a 100GB drive in her to start with, which has grown increasingly stuffed with various applications, media and other bric-a-brac. Clearing a bunch of that out is likely to help as well, but this has brought me to something of a philosophical quandary: given my recent decision to move into the cloud, how much sense does it make to buy a 7200RPM 500GB hard drive, even if is less than $150 now? I could buy this monster and thus have enough hard drive space to never worry about offloading photos and videos from my 16GB miniSD card again (well, not for a while anyway), but I'm growing increasingly concerned with the idea of data loss. That's why I bought the Western Digital Mirror Edition 2TB drive for backups at home - and the idea is that I'd offload all the photos and videos and whatnot onto that - but this recent trip showed me that when you're on the road, the cloud isn't always there for you, and it's not always feasible to try and move large amounts of data up and down that way. Worse, the bigger the hard drive, the more likely it is that (knowing me) the time between backups will just get bigger and bigger, thus increasing the likelihood of total catastrophic data loss if something should go wrong with said laptop. So theoretically I should buy a smaller hard drive to enforce my 'encloudification' and minimize any data loss, but it's hard to buck the notion of "yeah, but it's only a few bucks more..." Et cetera, et cetera.

What do you folks think?