I am currently using a '11 MacBook Pro as my editing work station. I upgraded my HDD to a SSD and moved the factory 750GB 5400rpm HD into the optical bay in which I use for personal storage(music, movies, etc), my photography business and Lightroom library and some other media storage. I do most of my video editing off of OWC 7200rpm Elite Minis and Dual Minis.
My question is, will notice any significant performance difference when editing photos or videos stored on my factory MBP HD in the optical bay by upgrading the that HD to a 750GB 7200 WD Black HD?

Why limit yourself to 7200rpm? The 10,000rpm 3rd gen Velociraptors, for instance, can do a sustained throughput of 200MB/s. That will be well over twice as fast as your 540rpm drive.

Tech ARP - Western Digital VelociRaptors Vs. Solid State Drives Rev. 2.0 (http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=759&pgno=0)

As per your question re editing stills, I feel certain you would notice a more fluid and smoother workflow. I have a pair of the much slower 2nd gen 600Gb V'raptors in a rain0 that give sustained read & write of 250MB/s for video projects, but my stills are on a pair of 1TB WD Blacks in a raid0 with gives me a bit over 200MB/s sustained transfer speeds. RAW files load more or less instantly. It's only multi-layered PSD files where I might notice a small delay in loading.

(the above times where recorded with Crystal Benchmark)

Thanks for the suggestion. I wish I could use something like that, but its apparently .6" too thick for my model MBP.
That seems to be the issue with all fast drives with non-17" MBP.

How about USB3 externals? I have four WD My Books, and Crystal Benchmark scores them at 110MB/s continuous through put read and write.

That wont work for me either. Only the current model MBPs come with USB3.

Sorry Chad, but I know next to nothing about Macs, but a quick Google told me the original MBPs had four 16 lane PCI card slots:

Mac Pro: About the PCI Express slots (http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2838)

I would imagine that is more than fast enough to support USB3. My first two WD My Book externals were attached to my old system via PCI card sockets. The drivers were a wee bit flakey though.

Thanks, but I had the unfortunate luck of buying one of the few models without one. In 2011, only the 17" came with the express-card port.

Here is more about the model that I have Lookup Mac Specs By Serial Number, Order, Model & EMC Number, Model ID @ EveryMac.com (http://www.everymac.com/ultimate-mac-lookup/?search_keywords=MacBookPro8,2)

15"
2.2 i7
256SSD
16GB Ram
1GB AMD Radeon HD 6750M

I am currently using a '11 MacBook Pro as my editing work station. I upgraded my HDD to a SSD and moved the factory 750GB 5400rpm HD into the optical bay in which I use for personal storage(music, movies, etc), my photography business and Lightroom library and some other media storage. I do most of my video editing off of OWC 7200rpm Elite Minis and Dual Minis.
My question is, will notice any significant performance difference when editing photos or videos stored on my factory MBP HD in the optical bay by upgrading the that HD to a 750GB 7200 WD Black HD?

I have no experience with MACs but in a PC envirionment it doesnt give me any perfomance advantage to use a 160 GB SSD compared with my 7200 RPM HDD. It's the rendering that takes time and not the storage onto a media.
My CPU is a quad core i7 and can virtually have up to 8 CPUs. But still it's the processor that is the bottleneck and it uses all CPU power to convert my footage.