The crow :
kanewolf :
I don't recommend anything smaller than a 240GB these days. Prices have dropped enough that the extra room makes it much easier.
Little pricy, my rig is already running over my £500 budget.
Is it really that big of a deal/is there much difference between load times for SSD and HDD?
An order of magnitude (10X) at least. SSDs transfer 500MB/s and have 0 rotational and seek delay. That corresponds to real time saved.
A 120GB is OK if you have to cut costs. You just need to manage your space usage much more closely. You NEVER want to be more than 90% full on an SSD.