I'm looking for a new hard drive to replace the old 4,200 RPM drive in my 3.0 GHz P4 laptop. My main criteria is speed in loading applications. Capacity isn't so important-- I can store media on network shares.

It's an old laptop that takes PATA, so I don't want to sink too much money into it. Here are two drives that interest me:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820208445
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148073

I think the lower latency of the SSD should make my system seem more responsive, but perhaps the mechanical drive is capable of transferring sequential data more quickly allowing large applications like OpenOffice to load more quickly.

What do you all think?

The SSD is getting good reviews - I was going to say that most cheaper SSDs are good and fast for loading sequential data, but for random data like an operating system, you'd want to go with a more expensive unit as the controller chips just aren't up to speed. This doesn't seem to apply too much though... All of the reviews are reporting pretty good boot speeds.

SSDs are much faster then HDDs for reading but slower for writing. There are much less fragile but more expensive per GB.

I wouldnt get that particular SSD. Like that other guy said, it looks like one with the buggy Jmicron controller. Sure, youll get some good sequencial r/w performance but when it comes to random r/w ive heard of people having total OS stalls for a couple seconds while the drive catches up with the requests.

There are plenty of SSDs that have better controllers, i think Intel has their own controllers in their SSD line but other than that idk, shop around.

That seagate i think is the same one i got for my thinkpad a couple months ago, my vote definately goes for that. It gets about 40MB/s peak and its pretty much as quiet as a SSD. Not to mention 160GB > 32GB.