My employer has authorized my purchase of anew T420.

Pleas help me with the drive. Should I choose the 160GB SSD or the 500GB 7200 rpm?

This laptop does mostly spreadsheets and similar business apps (Quickbooks) It also has my personal photo files and iTunes.

Are there other considerations?

The 2 day sale ends tomorrow so I have to make final decisions quickly.

Thanks

No argument in this household ... GBs of storage are worth more than microseconds of access speed.

One is able to upgrade when SSD becomes more cost effective.

I don't think "killer" has ever used a machine with an SSD.
This isn't "microseconds of access speed", but quite a few seconds.

Do you need more than 100GB of storage space? If so, the hard drive's your only choice.

If not, get the SSD and see the machine boot to a useable desktop and open every application you have on there in about 30 seconds.
A hard drive will do that too... in about 2 minutes.

Responsiveness is also improved somewhat- click something and it happens- you're not waiting for the machine to catch up.

@Q-Ball,
No, you are correct, I have never used an SSD. For a quick decision it seemed the best option ... and decision speed was of the essence according to the OP.
That choice may be altered later if that is what the OP decides.

When SSDs come down in price and grow in size (which is probably inevitable) they will be first choice. Meanwhile, if you put the beast to sleep rather than powering off, it doesn't take more than a few seconds to restart.

I hope that makes sense.

Thanks to both of you for weighing in.

I opted for the 500GB (cause I'm a packrat). And with the money saved from SSD, I selected Office 2010 w Acrobat X.

HOWEVER...the quote is in queue at Lenovo waiting on Lenovo's finance folks to approve the sales tax exemption. So, I've locked in the TwoDay sale price even though the e-coupon expires today.

I MAY be able to edit the quote tomorrow to change the 500GB to the SSD.

Tough call. I'll chew on it this evening. If Lenovo won't allow me to change spec tomorrow, it's moot.

Again, thanks to both of you. And Q-Ball, i do value speed. One of the main reason for replacing my T400 is because its sloooow.

If you don't need more space than the SSD provides, I'd go for the SSD hands down. Particularly since it's a work machine, likely to be configured with aggressive virus scanning based on corporate policies, potentially encrypted volume on the drive, etc. All of those things eat away at performance and the SSD really helps, IMHO.