its worth noting when Gavin first proposed making bigger blocks the biggest objection from the Core developers was its not needed and if it is ever needed the limit could be changed quickly. well it's needed and they now saying next year.
There is no urgent need for bigger block size limit. Spam need to be filtered out off the blockchain.
I'm paying normal tx fees and so far I haven't had any tx delays or other issues sending bitcoins. Do you have any problems sending your bitcoins?
spam (whatever that is) is nicely exorcise from the block chain by 1) don't process (or relay) new transactions without a fee, and 2) charging a nominal fee $0.01 for minimum transaction sizes for new transactions.
you don't need to limit the block size to prevent spam.
If you want to spam the network with a limited block size send a million fee paying transaction with a fee too low to process. it will fill up the mem pool and cause delays.
HD Space is a non issue when it comes to cost $300 for 6TB. It's the cost to relay transactions on a limited bandwidth network that is extensive.
If you want to prevent the type of spam that causes congestion to the network write the transactions into the block chain take the fee, a million spam transactions will cost the spammer $10,000 if miners don't adjust there fees at a minimum of $0.01 that's 230MB ($1.5 in HD Space)
so a spam attack costs with a minimum fee of $0.01 = $10,000 results in a $1.5 in hard drive space, = network unaffectedthat same spam attack today with limited block space will crash nodes and block the mem pool for hours if not days, and cost the spammer nothing as his fees are returned to him.