FYI. The original ssd in this laptop was a 128GB OCD agility 2.

I briefly saw one SMART report saying it had over 2000 GB written to it.
And some ungodly number of errors.

I now have a 256GB Crucial M4. The version that includes a sweet USB data cable. The only difficulty I had was not remembering to partition it GUID first. I made the wrong assumption that the restore function would carry that out.

The vertex 3 will be tried in a windows machine before sending it back.