NeuromancerWGDD'U

My old hard-drive is coughing up blood, and producing grinding noises that hint of impending doom. As such, I am now in the market for a new hard-drive, but I'm also on a budget .

I've been looking at a few hard-drives in the 80-90 dollar range, and I want to know; will I really even see a difference in speed between a drive with an 8.5 ms seek time, and a drive with 8.9 ms seek time? The 8.5 and the 8.9 ms seek time drives seem pretty mixed when it comes to price (almost as if there was no difference between them at all). If it matters, I use my computer for gaming and music -- sometimes at the same time. I also occasionally use it for music editing, but that's more processor/RAM intensive.

As a side-question, what is "NCQ"? I've seen it on a drive I'm considering (I'm pretty darn sure my hardware doesn't support it), but I have no clue as to what it is.

EDIT: I posted a while back about how my PS/2 ports had been tweaking out on me. I figured out why. Somehow, the hard-drive is causing the mouse/keyboard to stop responding/go insane. When it happens, the entire system skips for a second, the hard-drive LED turns solid, and the PS/2 issues start.

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My little machine:

S423 Pentium 4 1.3Ghz, 4x256 16-bit RIMM RAM, 32MB TNT2 video card. I think it may be time to upgrade...

The upgrade! My machine will soon be a 939 X2 4000+, 4x512 DDR400, and an 8600GTS.