Early Macbook Pro 2011 HDD Upgrade?

Hey all I currently have the Hitachi HTS545050B9A302 (standard hdd) installed.

I am wondering if anyone has benchmarks on this drive and if would see considerable performance increases by installing a faster drive.

Would one recommend moving to an SSD (Currently I am using close to 400GB) or just moving to a better HDD?

I am looking at also purchasing the new LaCie thunderbolt external drive... it looks like this will be faster than my internal drive?

Any advice/ good links would be appreciated. I've looked into SSD but I don't want to drop close to a grand to get the amount of space I need.

Here's my take.... Right now prices for both a large SSD (320 to 500 GB) and the just announced line of Thunderbolt hard drives are such that it's hard (for me anyway) to justify purchasing one. Perhaps later on when prices come down, I'll change my mind.

If you're looking for a faster hard drive, consider purchasing a 7200 RPM model. Western Digital has just come out with a 1 TB model that will fit in a MBP. There are also 750 GB models available from several manufacturers.