Samsung 830 or Intel 520 are very good choices. Go for at least a 120 GB.

Actually, most of the current crop of SSDs should be fine. I was an early adopter and had huge headaches with my Vertex 3 when it was released.

For best practices, make sure to over-provision the SSD when it's the boot drive. Just don't allocate all the space for example when installing Windows, leave about 10% unallocated. This provides some very important extra space for the SSD firmware to do it's optimizations. Also, disable Windows drive spin down power savings. The SSD should always be powered, when the drive is idle is when TRIM, garbage collection and other maintenance activities occur. They can't happen if the drive is off. Along these lines, about once a week, reboot the computer and just leave it there over night. Don't log in or anything.


For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert.