I had one of those IDE-to-SATA converters lying around in my drawer for some reason. I used it to throw a modern 500G SSD into my old P4:

I transferred my Debian install from the period 160G HDD onto the SSD drive and now it's nice and quiet, and quite a bit speedier than the original IDE HDD.
But I only use it with Linux because Windows XP doesn't have TRIM support and will kill the SSD in short order if I run it. Linux on the other hand... no problem, it's safe:
~$ lsblk --discard
NAME DISC-ALN DISC-GRAN DISC-MAX DISC-ZERO
fd0 0 0B 0B 0
fd1 0 0B 0B 0
sda 0 512B 2G 0
├─sda1 0 512B 2G 0
├─sda2 0 512B 2G 0
└─sda3 0 512B 2G 0
sr0 0 0B 0B 0
sr1 0 0B 0B 0
(Non-zero DISC-GRAN and DISC-MAX values indicates TRIM support)
Another proof that Linux is just plain better 😉
The machine has been rocking this disk all day long without any problem. I recommend this little doodad.
Just don't waste your money installing a high end drive. It's never going to touch the peak throughput of the drive.
That's not the point, it'll still be faster and more responsive. Even if only by moving the bottleneck
It was just a general PSA. You can get away with a cheaper drive as long as it's reliable.