Interestingly enough... I have been looking into this over the past couple of weeks (for my Macbook Pro)!
This guide will help you through the whole process, while preserving your entire OS install, files, and settings. It will even link you to the needed products!
Since you have a MacBook Pro, you might want to do a search on google for "macbook pro upgrade drive" and choose the extremetech link (I can't post urls yet) they have all the steps to perform on the MBP.
I did it last year, and it took about 30 minutes for the hard drive swap, not including the data portion. If you follow the steps on extremetech you shouldn't have any problems.
I always used SuperDuper! to back up my system to an external drive, so I just used that external drive to boot and do a restore to the new fresh drive.
The other step I didn't see documented, was a BootCamp partition. I used an application called WinClone to create a backup of my BootCamp partition and the restore worked like a charm too.
They only support SATA drives and the size limit is more of what the largest 2.5" drive being manufactured at the moment which I think is 500GB at the moment.
1.5 or 3.0 doesn't really matter, since the 3.0 will fall back to 1.5 if the controller doesn't support it, sometimes a jumper needs to be installed to a SATA2 disk to run at SATA1 speeds. I think most MacBook Pro's have SATA1 controllers. It is possible that the Santa Rosa models might have SATA2, but I am not 100% sure.
i've looked into the system information pane... its 1.5GBps... i ended up wtih a 500gb samsung drive, sata 3.0gbps, 5400rpm (not great, but thats what i got now), the capacity was of a greater concern than the speed of the drive...
The Samsung HM500LI is the drive I just installed to my MBP. After I installed the drive, I just simply used TimeMachine to reinstall my OS to its last backup state. Took no more then 1 hour. Just install the drive, insert your Leopard OS disk, open Utilities and then TimeMachine. This is all assuming that you are using an external source as a backup drive.
The entire process from opening the MBP, installing the drive, reassembling the MBP and then restore all took roughly 1 hour and 45 mins. Then again, I have done plenty of work on MBPs before.
