Internal HD upgrade or external HD for my Macbook Pro (Late 2008)

Hello,
I am finding the 250gb internal hard drive not enough and want to upgrade to a 500gb/1tb hard drive for my macbook pro (late 2008 edition).
What I am wondering is whether to change the internal hard drive OR buy the fastest possible external hard drive for my mac which I believe is one that works with firewire 800 as my late 2008 macbook pro does not come with USB 3.0.
The external hard drive I have found is £110 and my macbook would be using the Firewire 800 connection:
LaCie Rugged Triple 301984 1TB USB 3.0 and Firewire 800 5400 rpm Portable Hard Disk Drive
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rugged-Triple-301984-Firewire-Portable/dp/B005C2BNJI
I dont necessarily need the portability of a external hard drive. I work with large files (photoshop, illustrator files mainly) and would would be concerned that I would not be able to work directly on the hard drive for this type of work so an internal hard drive may be better/
Can anyone suggest a good, fast, cheap, popular internal hard drive compatible with my computer and whether you would suggest changing the internal HD or buying an external.
I am running Mavericks and the only other change I have made is by upgrading my RAM from 4gb to 8gb. Thanks so much for your help
Hardware Overview:
  Model Name: MacBook Pro
  Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,1
  Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
  Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
  Number of Processors: 1
  Total Number of Cores: 2
  L2 Cache: 3 MB
  Memory: 8 GB
  Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
  Boot ROM Version: MBP51.007E.B06
  SMC Version (system): 1.33f8
  Serial Number (system): W8******1G0
  Hardware UUID: *****
  Sudden Motion Sensor:
  State: Enabled
<Edited By Host>

For both convenience and speed, I'd recommend replacing the internal hard drive.  Your MacBook Pro can handle nearly any internal SATA 2.5" HD on the market, including 7200rpm models. For what it's worth, I'd recommend a Western Digital Black WD7500BPKX or similar or Hitachi HGST 7K1000 although in my experience Hitachi drives run hot and that's the reason I don't use them as internal drives.
FW800 is fine, but then you have an external hard drive to lug around plus the connection is considerably slower than the internal SATA connection used by the internal hard drive.
Note that you will have to either 1) clone your existing drive to the new drive or 2) completely reinstall OSX and all your apps from scratch to the new drive when you replace the internal drive.   If it were me, I'd take the opportunity to reinstall everything from scratch.
btw, I have done this myself on a number of 2008/2009 MacBook Pros and it's not hard at all.  iFixit has tutorials on how to do this.  (Here is a link to the one that I believe is your model.

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