I'm stepping out into this minefield tomorrow.  Based on the information I've found on these forums and the bewildering amount of confusing 'information' on the internet (as well as some rather vociferous conversations with work colleagues), I've gone for a Samsung Pro SSD (both for the decent warranty period and also the bundled migration software).  I think my system drive is starting to fail as my PC is having boot-up issues, right around the time that the boot drive would need to be accessed.  Hopefully this upgrade will resolve the matter (or at least eliminate this as a candidate).

after using the Samsung migration tool, almost all of my software was functioning correctly.  I did have a couple of hiccups I had to overcome with 32bit plugins and I had to reauthorize a few things (but not reinstall).  overall I'd say it was a very smooth cloning experience.  and I went from a 1T magnetic drive to a 500G SSD Samsung EVO.  I was very happy with the results.

Using the Samsung migration tool software was astonishingly easy and pain-free.   I used a USB 2 connection to clone the drive so it took a little while (about 3 hours), swapped the SSD for the system hard drive and it just worked! 
 
Then I went and terrified myself for a while as the Samsung Magician was saying that the drive would work better in AHCI mode.  I went into the BIOS, changed the drive mode to AHCI (3 options; IDE, RAID and AHCI) but then Windows was blue-screening every time it started up.  Also, it was no longer possible to enter the BIOS using the del key!  My BIOS is some kind of weird 'Hybrid EFI' thing.  I noticed that one of the start messages was saying something like, "only works with disk drives".  So I swapped the original system drive back in, was then able to boot into Windows without blue-screening, restarted and then was able to re-enter the BIOS and change the setting back to IDE.  Put the SSD back in and decided to leave it well alone from that point on.  
 
The only issue I've found thus far was that I had to re-register the ARC2 software.
 
The system still sometimes hangs at the BIOS splash screen at start-up though, so it wasn't the drive after all.  No idea what's causing that to happen yet.