Upgrading my X61 Tablet - Which Hard Drive?

I'm looking at this one- Seagate Momentus 7200 320GB 2.5" Mobile Hard Drive. My budget is $250. Will SSD prices fall by January enough that I can get a high-quality 64GB one?

I don't really care about size (not sure how much space note taking will require), just about quietness, coolness and speed. But 32 GB is too small.

 

I think the Seagate is about the best hard drive on the market right now (fast, quiet, cheap, and efficient). Multi-Level Cell SSD have already reached $250 for a 64GB drive. However, Single-Level Cell SSD (like the Samsung in the x300/x301) are faster and more power efficient, and it is unlikely that they will get that low that soon (I am waiting as well).

Multi-Level Cell Drives
Super Talent 64GB ($150 after MIR)
OCZ Core 60GB ($239 after MIR)
Transcend 64GB ($180)

Single Level Cell Drives
Samsung 64GB ($700) This is what the x300/x301 use
OCZ 64GB ($680 after MIR) This is the Samsung drive with a new badge.

If your main concern is noise and a good random access time for reads, then any of the MLC drives will work, and are relatively inexpensive now. If your concern is max performance (especially sequential writes) and battery life (The MLC drives may actually be worse on battery than a 7200RPM Seagate) then you need an SLC drive, and they are currently very expensive.

Update - The advantage of SLC drives is actually random writes, more so than sequential writes. MLC drives (and hard drives) are good for sequential writes, but suck at random writes (especially with a large I/O queue) due to high latency. Unfortunately, lots of random writes are sort of the nature of most applications, and thus you pay a substantial penalty for the cheap drives. More information in this article.