Turns out the Dell laptop I have has a hard drive that overheats worse than just about anything inside the machine. Any kind of intensive work for the hard drive eventually leads to the computer shutting down due to protect itself from thermal damage.

So the question is, what SSD will offer me the most reliability. This is the wife's laptop so it'll mainly be used for her work and browsing/candy crush, the usual crap. 128 GB should be fine too, we have enough external storage around the place.

Oh yeah, its an i3 2.4ghz cpu with 4gb of ram. So it still has plenty of life left for what it has to do, the hard drive just seems to run really hot.

samsung 840 pro seems to get a lot of love on hexus. and the crucial m4

could be an interesting thread though, looking like i'll buy one on pay day.

Samsung 840 Pro is the daddy at the moment in value terms, M4 is still great but its not quite as new. Extremely reliable though. I plan on buying one of these two soon, I've already got a Crucial C300 and an M4 but I need another SSD for my laptop and they're on the shortlist.

If you want reliability you can't go wrong with Crucial or Intel, I don't think Samsung have any issues either. They key is the controllers, which so far have proven terrible for some other manufacturers, Intel use their own and so do Crucial (Micron), I'm not sure which Samsung use.

Samsung use  3-Core ARM9 Risc MDX 300MHz controller.Samsung seem to be a very good choice.A lot of very good SSD's on the market now
so go for what you feel confident with.