Decide my Hard Drive upgrade on my MBP

I am upgrading the hard drive on my MBP and I have narrowed my decision down to two options and they could not be any more different..

Should I get a 64GB SSD or a 500GB 7200rpm HDD??

Here are the facts: I am a college student and currently have the stock 160GB 5400rpm HDD still in there. My main concern is speed, with storage at second place, battery life a close third, noise a very distant fourth and weight a close fifth. I am NOT willing to do the Superdisk and SSD swap mod as I have done a cost-benefit analysis on convenience of extra storage v. extra cost of a external cd drive + convenience forgone by eliminating cd drive. Not worth it to me.

After researching and finding that I can get a 64GB SSD for around $100 and a 500/7200 HDD for the same price, it comes out to .64GB/dollar vs. 5GB/dollar

So I want to cut out all the guess work and come up with a formula that will just tell me what to buy...

the only thing that is missing now is the amounts of difference that each option will yield.

So, in comparison to my 160/5400 HDD currently in my MBP... what will be the impact on speed/battery life/noise/weight by going to SSD or going to 500/7200 HDD?

I would prefer it to be in percentages.. like for example:

Impact on speed
SSD +60%, HDD +25%
Impact on battery life
SSD +30%, HDD -15%

etc. you get the picture.. so can you guys help me out here?

What model MBP have you got ??

I have to go but have a look at these SSD v HD benchmarks from OWC MacSales
OWC~Benchmarks ..... SSD v HD

Cheers

So a lot of research i've done via this link and google seems to suggest that SSD is a pretty big leap over HDD in terms of speed on a Macbook and not that big of a difference on a Windows machine.

Most the Macbook tests are, curiously, done with Adobe Photoshop, which I will not be using. I'm really torn here. I think I am just going to buy both (aah!!) and try each one for a few weeks and then sell the one I don't want.

SSD drives are better for laptops, because they haven't any mechanic parts, and they are faster than 2.5" 5400rpm drives commonly used for laptops.

But you may be careful with disk usage, because memory cells on SSD drives have a limited number of read/write cycles (100000 for SLC and 10000 for MLC cells).

Edredr said:

But you may be careful with disk usage, because memory cells on SSD drives have a limited number of read/write cycles (100000 for SLC and 10000 for MLC cells).

Click to expand...

It is for this reason that I would stick with a good 7200RPM HD like this one Newegg.com - HITACHI Travelstar 7K500 HD20500 IDK/7K 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive at least until decent size SSDs are more comparative in price.

Yeah I was kind of worried about that. I didn't realize the price of 500GB 7200rpm HDDs had gone down so much. $75 is a no-brainer to me.