How much general improvement should I expect upgrading from my hdd?

So I currently have a Lenovo T500 with these specs:
C2D P8700 2.53GHz
Ati 3650 GPU
4GB DDR3 RAM

and

250GB 5400 RPM Seagate drive, 38.9GB Free /177GB C: drive, a nearly empty data g: drive, and other random small partitions ~14gb.

The gist of it "benchmarks":
Boot up to windows log in: 62 seconds
Boot up from hibernate: 25 seconds
From log in to fully loaded desktop: 25 seconds
From hibernate log in: 3 seconds
To hibernate: 23 seconds
(opening these for the first time from a fresh boot, usually is faster later)
firefox: ~10 seconds
chrome: 3 seconds
IE: 13 seconds
Office 2007 items: 1-2 seconds.
iTunes: 4 seconds


I thought this booted relatively fast, but I guess I was wrong when I timed it. At least compared to my old desktop, it was much faster, but compared to numbers I've read, it's pretty slow.

I'm looking for rought estimate comparisons, if possible, to:
hitachi 7k500
intel x25-m g2 80gb ssd
From the moment I pressed the power button, to reach the log in screen it took 1 min and 2 seconds. After typing in my password it took 25 seconds to reach my desktop loaded with my small amount of start up programs.

Then I opened firefox and it took quite a noticeable amount of time, possibly 10 seconds or so. I didn't time it this time and it won't reproduce the same result if I just open close right now. The next best thing was to open chrome which took 3 seconds. Then internet explorer, which took about 13 seconds, and additional time to even be responsive. It even froze firefox for a few seconds (i think my hdd is messing up...)

Opening office 2007 outlook took 2 seconds, word/powerpoint 1 second, and itunes took 4 seconds.

I'm going to test boot up from hibernate.

It took 23 seconds to hibernate, took 25 seconds to boot up from hibernate, and reached the desktop useable in about 3 seconds. Mozilla took about 10 seconds again.

 

wow that's a long time.
have you try to defrag it or something?
of course ssd will be faster, maybe around 20 seconds boot (to usable)
with 7200 rpm hdd maybe ~30-40 boot (to usable)

 

The Hitachi 7K500 should be around 20 seconds to 40 seconds for boot time, depending on whether you have a lot of start up processes or not. Intel X25-M should be around 10 - 30 seconds, again depending on the start up processes. Of course, the times will go above that, but generally only if you have a pretty unreasonable amount of start up programs.

When you use the 80GB SSD, you will want to watch out for how much space you are using on it, as the performance will start to degrade if you use more than 58GB, roughly. Program opening like Firefox and MS Word, etc, should be pretty much instant.

I know it may seem like there is not much of a difference in boot time, but in other aspects of using your machine the SSD will outperform the 7K500 by a fair bit. Opening programs will generally take longer on the HDD than the SSD, and with the SSD, your system will most likely feel a lot more snappy and responsive. It's been said before, getting an SSD can make your laptop feel like it can last another ten years.

And that Seagate that you have sucks, even my crappy, dying Fujitsu is better than that.

 

I know that the 7K500 will be faster, but numbers-wise? I wouldn't guess for your case (don't have nearly enough details).

But, as suggested a good defrag is the least costly solution (try to get a beta or trial (March 2010) of PerfectDisk 11). You'll be surprised how a defrag levels the performance difference between two mech. drives.

Make no mistake though; a faster drive is still noticeable (but still needs defragging to perform at or better than the older/slower drive its compared to).

The following thread discusses this issue specifically (hope it helps you a little):

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=5609787#post5609787