Replacing WD Scorpio Blue HD with SSD

It's possible but not cost-effective.  You have a SATA150 controller - which isn't ideal for what will otherwise be an expensive replacement drive.  This is a budget model -- not a high performance one.  Just as it would make no sense to put a V8 engine into a Honda Civic, it makes little sense to put a solid state drive into a 1525.  Replace with a standard hard drive.

In the interests of possibly helping anyone else who finds themselves in the same situation that I did, I thought I should reply to both this post and, perhaps oddly, my earlier one.

Western Digital kindly answered the question I actually asked - what was the equivalent SSD drive, and was it compatible. 

"You can use any of our SiliconEdge Blue drives from the link below since they would have the same physical dimensions and SATA connectors as your original 320GB drive.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=90"

To recap, I found myself in the situation where I had a failing hard drive, and could spend (roughly) $50 or so for a direct replacement (ie for another 320GB Scorpio Blue hard drive) or roughly $200 (on eBay) for a 128GB SiliconEdge Blue SSD.  As it turns out, my wife (whose laptop this is) only uses the C: drive for programs, and OS (she keeps all her files on an external drive), and so she'd only used about 70GB of the drive.  Ergo, a 128GB SSD would work.

The question was therefore whether the possible performance improvement of an SSD was worth the incremental $150.  I thought it might be worth trying, so I did.  I just cloned the thing this afternoon (using Acronis True Image, which does the job quite nicely), and installed it. 

I'm sure that EJN63 is correct that I'm not getting the maximum benefit out of this drive, due to the host laptop being a relatively low end one.  However, I believe it was indeed worth it, as I'm finding that Windows 7 is loading in about half the time, and most of the disk intensive tasks on the machine (loading a new copy of Word, for example) are noticably faster.  Of course, YMMV, but in the end I'm glad that I gave it a shot.  I think that it was worth the extra $150, especially as it may stave off the day for another year or two before I have to replace this machine.

Michael can I suggest you download and open AS SSD without actually running the benchmark. The screen will tell you if your alignment is correct or not. If it's correct it'll show ok in the upper left corner and if not it will say bad.

Correct alignment is important for extracting maximum drive performance.