You can consider samsung drives. Samsung is 1 manufacturer that does a lot of backward compatibility testing compared to other key SSD makers out there.
Look out samsung 830-840 series reviews and you'll see that people have no troubles in getting them to work from linux to mac to even dinosaurs running windows.
For current Intel drives you can only be sure that it'll work beat with current lntel chipsets and anything beyond is just an assumption. Each series has its own set of compatibility issues ranging from stutters/freezing, inability to power off on certain laptops etc (isolated to certain computer models). One fairly recent example would be the HP Probook issues with the 530. Crucial, the m4 had frequent power cycling issues with specific systems although it was largely a good ssd. On these systems, it would disappear from the bios and only be detected if you leave it powered on, untouched for maybe hours.
Personally, I had no problems in getting Samsung drives (840 EVO and 830) working with 2 of my SATA 2 systems and they run a chipset from the penryn series and its direct predecessor, an intel 5 series chipset running a gen 1 i5.
The next biggest selling point of these samsungs are the migration software bundled. The Samsung/Clonix data migration tool makes a perfect disc clone withoutissues like corruption, disc errors seen with norton ghost, and other substandard cloners. Saves you the hassle of running a clean windows installation.
Both systems use a cloned image of the original hard disk that came with those laptops. No issue till this date.
As for performance and IOPS, the i5 gen 1 laptop runs 240/260 read write, iops of 30k+ read and write. For the penryn, 230/230 read write, 30k+ read and write iirc i don't have immediate access to that system atm.
Lastly, you're unlikely to saturate the maximum theoretical transfer speeds of all sata interface standards. I.e. SATA 3 theoretically peaks at 600 but it goes up to only 550 in rare scenarios where all conditions are optimal, chipset, motherboard, etc.
The penryn came from a 7200rpm hitachi to an evo, performance boost was immediately noticeable, huge excel spreadsheets stopped hanging.
The same was observed with the i5 and the boost was even more apparent because it ran a 5400rpm prior to the upgrade. Huge Excel spreadsheets no longer crapped up on it.
At the same time, I would probably avoid second hand storage devices like hard drives. You don't know if it's an RMA'd disk and if that's the case, you don't know if how the refurbishment process of a faulty SSD works. Is it just a simple secure erase + firmware flash or could it be more or less? The Intel 320 has a known bug; 8MB data corruption bug that wasn't completely fixed on its final firmware. Doesn't affect all, but affects a notable number of 320s potentially.
Just my 2 cents.
