I don't have a turbo and don't find myself driving at high speed to really benefit from rear ventilated discs. Do they provide a noticable benefit?

I'd say not really, unless you are doing some frequent hard braking like circle track or something, then typically you would upgrade the front and rear.

no. Vented rears are expensive, rare, and only provide a fraction of the benefit of better front brakes.

 

Start with good pads, fresh fluid, and SS lines if you want an improvement. After that a set of slightly bigger fronts (turbo legacy size) would be good if you had heat problems.

 

If you really wanted to upgrade the rear, a set of wagon calipers would be step one, and step 2 would be 290mm solid discs.

When maybe 80% of your braking efficiency in the front brakes (compare the size of the pads front and rear) I wouldn't see much advantage to adding vented rotors to the rear brakes.

Only useful for track work - or very heavy cars.

They just increase the heat sinking capacity of the brakes. If you aren't fading out your brakes from over-heating them just keep your stock stuff well-maintained and you will be fine.

 

Now on my Sport Sedan which sees road tracks and makes frequently repeated stops from above 100mph down to the 30mph region at said tracks, I'm very glad I have rear vented rotors. Never had to pull in early because of overheated brakes.

What is involved to go to vented disks?

 

(out of curiosity, I already have vented disks on my sport sedan, just bought new rotors too, special order, $18 each)

calipers, brackets, rotors. It all just bolts on.