Just make sure you have a good UPS to protect said hard drive. I've lost several HDs here to BEL, including one expensive firewire one on its first use in Belize. The power went off when I was using it, then came back on less than a second later with (probably) an immense voltage surge. Bye-bye hard drive.

I now only use self-powered USB drives which seem to have plateaued at 320 gb. Maybe anything larger would demand more power than USB can provide. So I have a couple of them, and may get more as the need arises. Combined with a laptop, which of course has its own in-built UPS, my hard drives are fully protected.

I also use 16gb USB flash drives, which cost me US$18 each.

My reflex lens had/has a fixed aperture of f8 so it's only suitable for hand-held use outdoors in daylight, not that hand-holding a 600mm lens is particularly easy. This is decades before anti-vibration technology.

All my early photography was with a Zeiss Contina, a very simple but high quality viewfinder camera with absolutely everything manual and no automatic advice. Nonetheless I got some pretty good results. I recall taking it to a "specialist" camera shop to have the focussing recalibrated as infinity no longer seemed to be at infinity, and that was the end of the camera. They gave it to the Saturday morning help to work on, and he totally destroyed it internally.

I also loved using a little Minox 35mm camera, which did have auto-exposure but nothing else. Oh, and a superb lens and very good shutter. That could also produce wonderful results (especially in low light) and did for several years until I was relieved of it by muggers in Johannesburg!

Since I first got the Minox, at around the same time I bought the A1, I've always had a good but bulky camera plus a pretty good pocketable one. If that was good enough for Patrick Lichfield (famous English photographer who was related to the Queen) then it worked for me. My pocket camera now is a Samsung Digimax L85, bought for just over $100, which produces results often indistinguishable from my 5D. Just a small difference in price though!

On my DSLR I'm moving more and more towards using primes rather than zooms. Although in theory a zoom should increase your creative capability I find it works in exactly the opposite way. Instead of studying the scene and positioning myself where I'd get the best shot, I tend to stay where I am and think "zoom". That may work for Mazda but it gets me into an automaton mood and kills creative thought. And of course, zooms are generally far slower than primes. I've gone back to keeping a standard 50mm lens for "walk-around", and I'm finding I'm getting better pictures. A lot depends whether a camera is an adjunct to other activities, or whether the purpose of going out is to take photographs. I take my SLR (and all my lenses) on trips whose sole purpose is to take photographs, of whatever may appear in front of me, whilst if I want to go out and do something and have a camera with me "just in case" then I just take a compact.