The current SSD drives have fairly good transfer rates but where they really whip tradtional HD's is in I/O they can do many many more simultaneous disk read/writes than a traditional HD could ever hope to do. That said theey still cost an absolute fortune for the available sizes.
Getting a nice solid 7200rpm traditional drive should be a nice improvement for you. I have the 200gig version of that Hitachi drive in my laptop and I highly recommend it.