[Darryl Ramm]

Samsung 860 Evo would likely be my go to.

Crucial is owned by Micron, a major manufacturer of NAND chips. They make nice drives, but typically make a wide variety of performance/cost drives. And you want to buy only their higher end consumer drives. But I'd go with Samsung largely because they control much more of the overall SSD and firmware development than most vendors.

Why limit yourself to SATA? Any other computer with spare PCIe slots can add PCIe/NVMe storage and for not much more that the cost of SATA you can get much faster performance. EDIT: OK I'll answer my own question, if you are really on Mountain Lion then you will need to upgrade to support NVMe, especially boot off NVMe. But if you are planning to upgrade then I'd include thinking about NVMe in that.