Had a Dell 1737 in need of an OS, and figured I'd try something different.
Quite liking this so far, have no experience of Mint at all, and aside from a few hours using Ubuntu, have no Linux experience.
Installed on a 64gb Crucial M4, performance is great. I was concerned that battery life wouldn't be as good as if I'd put Windows on, but it seems about the same.
I find that quite simplistic, try this for maybe slightly more up to date information. It's specific to Arch linux but nearly all of it will apply to any distro.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SSD
For example probably the best FS for SSD performance is BTRFS since it has an SSD mode, however make sure to enable compression only if your controller is not doing it already! XFS is in my book the best choice for reliability & performance on SSDs and I mainly use that on my builds.
I have put mint 16 mate on a old 4gb usb drive and it boots quite quick and looks easier to use than the last time I tried linux. Bit of a newbie when it comes to linux so was quite pleased to see that linux has become more user (read old windows user now newbie linux tempted) friendly.
As a long time windows user I am still trying get my head around internet security re firewall and antivirus protection.