Mac: Insufficient space

Is it that easy to fill up 120GB?

Yes, extremely easy. I'd already mentioned that Parallels was removed to try and free up some space, but with around 60GB of music, nearly 15GB of photos, then documents, videos, etc; plus programs and other miscellaneous settings, I soon found that I was down to only around 7GB free.

Posts on various Mac forums resulted in this extremely detailed and easy to follow guide to replacing a HDD.

Searches on various forums, including Apple's own, suggested that I could replace with a drive up to 500GB, but to get the speed I would need, a 320GB would be more suitable. I therefore plumped for the Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB SATAII 16MB Cache 2.5 inch Internal Hard Drive from Amazon for £72.99.

I followed the suggestions and initially backed up using the freeware Super Duper. Confident this had all worked OK, I was ready to begin.

Taking apart the MBP was not too difficult, and I was surprised at just how seemingly flimsy the insides were. Then I encountered a problem - Step 13 refers to removing the "... two silver Phillips screws securing the hard drive retaining bracket to the lower case". Well, I had no such screws. Nope, I had Torx screws. Better than that, they were Torx screws for which I did not have the appropriate bit.

So, a mad dash down to Maplins (where I also bought a sale price high gain aerial) produced the correct bit so I could continue.

Fortunately from there, all was plain sailing. The insertion of new drive was straightforward, restore from Super Duper too, and now, over a year later, I still have a reasonable proportion of free space (although, of course, it always expands to the space available)