Lots of good info about the hardware. There is an oblique reference to performance degradation over time with XP that you may have missed. Consider upgrading to Windows 7 or 8, both of which use the TRIM command to mitigate this effect which can be dramatic. Also, these OSes do the right thing with alignment of partitions etc that you will otherwise spend a lot of time getting right.

Finally, if you buy an Intel or Samsung SSD, you will get excellent software to do initial data migration and subsequent management of the SSD.