Leapfrog's Journal: Hardware problems

I've been having some hard drive problems on my "primary" system at home. It started with a whining noise like a locust, which has been appearing and disappearing at random for about four months now. Then, two weeks ago it started making the click of death. (For those who don't know, there is a very distinctive noise made by the drive heads whacking the stops at either end, generally because either the board or the software that controls the position of the heads is failing.) I recognized it, but it wasn't happening very often, and only during periods of high system activity.
Last night, it started clicking, and then clicked, and then clicked some more. This started, oddly enough, while I was online shopping for a new hard drive. The kernel complained once, and set the filesystem to readonly as a precaution, but the drives clicked on. Within a minute the system was hard-locked.
I powered it down and I was able to bring it back up long enough to order a new 40 GB disk. Hopefully, I'll get enough life out of it to get my stuff off before it really goes under.
I also ordered a new CD-RW (I don't recall just how fast, but I distinctly remember thinking that my processor {300 MHz} and motherboard probably wouldn't even come close to being able to burn that fast), just because it was on sale for $15. It also started me down the treacherous path of considering a new computer entirely. I still want to get a Mini-ITX motherboard and make a 1 Ghz Nintendo.
There was a time in my life when I honestly felt that there was no limit to the number of computers I could want. Now, I am mostly convinced that I really only need one, or maybe two. I used to like tinkering with as many varieties as possible (i.e. Setting up NetBSD on a Sun 3/50, or trying to get that Mac SE/30 to run Linux) just for the fun of it. I think spending eight hours a day in front of a generic Windows box just crushes my desire to play with computers. When I'm at home, other things just seem so much more important than compiling the latest kernel.
When I got my first hard drive (in 1996, it was a slightly used 500 MB), it filled up in a hurry. The next drive (2GB) filled even faster. I have been using a two-drive setup for a while now, totalling just under 9GB, and I've maintained just enough free space for an ISO image for at least four years, carefully deleting old stuff every time I wanted new stuff. I have a feeling that the new drive won't fill up nearly as fast, if at all. Unless I undertake the great CD Ripping project (unwise on a 300 MHz box) for my entire collection (and even so, the ~250 CDs will conservatively only take up 20GB of it) I just do not see what I'll fill it with. Every other drive I have ever purchased had plans to fill it before it even arrived. Now even a Terabyte, once a concept invoking rooms full of whirring drives and requiring infrastructure, is available in under $500. Wow.
So now I'm just yammering. Good old days, etc, etc. Blah. I'm done now.

Space

[IpalindromeI]

I used to think the same about hard drive space: that there could never be enough. I was fairly convinced when I got a 30Gb drive that I would have it filled quickly, but that was over 4 years ago and I don't think I've had it even half full. And the fullest it ever was was when I was big into Quake3 and had downloaded almost every major mod that existed, and kept separate installations for each version. At the time I felt it was pretty wasteful, but I never came close to filling the drive so it didn't matt

Re:Space

[Leapfrog]

I think my relationship to the new drive coming (vis-a-vis my inability to fill it) comes from two factors: Firstly that I'm pretty burned out on computing in general, and Secondly that my processor is so outdated that it can't really do anything that requires a large amount of space. I am, after all, still running a K6-300 with 96MB of really slow RAM.
I have fairly good bandwidth, so I imagine that I could take to downloading big stuff, but then what would I do with it? If you're not a member of the 2GHz c