Installing Snow Leopard onto early 2011 MBP SSD

I want to install a Crucial M500 480GB into my early 2011 MacBook Pro. First, two questions:
Performance and speed-wise, which OS should I install? Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, or Mavericks?
Say I decide to install Snow Leopard onto the SSD (fresh install). How would I do that? Given that:
my model will not boot up from the retail Snow Leopard disk (I had to clone a drive from an early 2008 Mac Pro containing 10.6.8 to my MBP's drive)
the early 2008 Mac Pro only has 3.5" bays and SATA II connectors (the SSD I want is SATA III)
What I have in mind is this (feel free to improve/correct if anything is wrong or could be done better):
Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my current MBP HD (which includes a Bootcamp partition) to an empty drive on my Mac Pro.
Install the SSD into the MBP.
Boot into Target Disk Mode so the SSD mounts on the MP. Then use the MP's Disk Utility to format SSD to correct settings.
Clone drive containing 10.6.8 from MP to MBP's SSD.
Boot into Target Disk Mode (the other way) so MP's drives mount onto MBP. Move wanted files from old HD to new SSD.
Thanks for taking the time to help out!

I purchased a USB 3 enclosure from OWC and inserted my new SSD. Plugged it into my 2011 MBP with SL and used Disk Utility to Restore my internal MBP HDD over to my SSD. Afterwards I tested the SSD to be sure I could boot from it. Last, I installed it into my MBP and it booted up with no issue. Everything went smooth.

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