Macbook 4.1 - SSD vs. 7200RPM

My Early 2008 macbook white (4.1, non unibody) is getting a little slow for my liking and I want to give it a nice speed boost. I've decided to do this the easiest way possible by tossing in 4GB of RAM (some places so it can hold 6 but 4 should be fine) and a faster hard drive.

What I'm trying to decide now is, which hard drive? With the kind of SATA I have I know that I would need one of the slower SSD's so is it worth the extra money or should I just buy a 7200 RPM HDD for the additional speed boost? Either one will speed it up I'm sure and I know the SSD would be faster but it also costs more.

My HDD right now is only 160GB and the SSD I've looked into is 120 which is plenty. My iMac and externals are used for actual storage, my macbook is just for portability so I'm not too worried about storage. It does have about 100GB full right now though so I need at least that much space. Plus I plan to buy an enclosure and put the old hard drive into that for extra storage.

Any opinions and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Any opinions at all?

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Jb07 said:

Even if it is an older SSD (SATA II?), it will still be much faster than a 7200 RPM drive. If you get a 120GB SSD, once you get OS X installed, the capacity will ~100GB, so you will be pushing its limits. Anyway, SSDs are much, much better than regular HDDs, and I would definitely recommend one over an HDD.

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I expect I'd have about 20 Gb left. I'll be using carbon copy cloner to pull my exact harddrive over onto the new one so I can work with 20 free. Mind you I could probably still clean it out a bit more.

Thanks for the opinion though. I knew SSD would still be faster, just wanted to make sure it would be enough to be worth the extra money.