nkedel

First, the tl;dr: there are a lot of choices. For most people, the differences don't matter. Choose on price and warranty length. If the last 32gb matters, perhaps ignore the 480gb drives. $519 a little on the pricy for a 480gb-512gb drive, but not unreasonable

If there is another one you're looking at and would like an opinion on, feel free to drop a few more links.

Longer answer: price, reliability, speed. Which is more important to you? Which is second? Which is least? There is also some impact to battery life differences, although it's less well documented.

The model I'd have recommended first as a good balance of performance and reliablity has been discontinued (Intel 520 series 480gb and when still available in channel is badly overpriced); the replacement (530-series) is not yet available.

At a really high level, virtually every brand sells a "slower" and a "faster" model, using different grades of flash (there are more than two; a few brands sell more than two grades in their line, but most pick two.) This will mainly be visible only if you're writing very large blocks of data at once, where the faster grades will write at least somewhat faster and in some cases, much much faster.

There are differences between controller models. If you're a very heavy user (especially in terms of the write performance you need), you'll want to read up on the differences. Heavy writes means you write out multigigabyte files and the difference between 200MB/second writes and 500MB/second writes sounds like an important thing rather than "OMG, those are both extremely fast" (remember that a wired ethernet cable is 1Gbit or 100-125MB/sec, so there are relatively few ways to copy stuff onto your machine as fast as even the slower drives.)

I've dealt with too many models at work and seen quirks to pretty much ALL of them to have a really emphatic recommendation for any of the others I've worked with. At the same time, the workloads we're dealing with count as "abusive" by most standards, so they're not very instructive of whether most people would notice the difference.

In the absence of an Intel 480gb I can recommend highly, three worth looking at:
Corsair Force GS 480gb -- $420, uses the same Sandforce controller as the Intel, and for one of the second-tier companies Corsair has probably got the best customer service if you do hit a problem. Very fast for "normal" workloads not involving a lot of compressed data, and less prone to the "I'm full" slowdown that Samsung and some others get. This is a very mature controller, with the firmware bugs worked out of it long since.

Samsung 840 Series 500gb -- $319 probably the slowest drive you're likely to look at, but fine for most users, and cheap as anything else... plus Samsung has an excellent reputation for reliability. This is being replaced with a newer model, the 840 EVO, which may be faster but is brand new and slightly faster -- I'd wait a few months for the firmware bugs to be worked out. (There is also the 840 Pro 512gb, which is very fast when new, but suffers badly from slowdown as the drive ages. Still quite fast for most people, but -- only about 6 months into the drive -- I wouldn't pay the premium over the regular 840 again.)

Assuming the drive is not encrypted using Microsoft Bitlocker, I recommend a free and open-source program called CloneZilla. It's about a 100MB ISO file, burns to CD or can be copied to a USB key, boots, and it's pretty easy.

Depends on the software, but in general, it's just boot from the duplicator software, copy it, and swap the new drive in physically (or do that first; there's no real advantage to either order.)