SSD's make a world of difference, the problem is Apple making it a real PIA to upgrade things after purchase... you can't even upgrade Ram on the 21inch iMacs anymore... not sure about HDD's.
@edscoble your machine is pretty old but I put (well, photoben) an SSD in an even older MBP I have and it became usable again so you will notice a massive difference in yours. I had a Mini for a bit with 2 drives, one an SSD and I swear it ran most everyday tasks faster than my work iMac which is a quad core beast with 24gb of ram.
1TB wont be cheap!
Get as big as you can afford and a decent external for most files... my internal is a 256GB (rMBP) and I keep a 1TB external with all my dropbox etc on.
SSD's make a world of difference, the problem is Apple making it a real PIA to upgrade things after purchase... you can't even upgrade Ram on the 21inch iMacs anymore... not sure about HDD's.
@edscoble your machine is pretty old but I put (well, photoben) an SSD in an even older MBP I have and it became usable again so you will notice a massive difference in yours. I had a Mini for a bit with 2 drives, one an SSD and I swear it ran most everyday tasks faster than my work iMac which is a quad core beast with 24gb of ram.