What size SSD? Swapping Optical Drive for gen. storage.

I'm planning on buying a smaller SSD and was looking for suggestions on the best size to buy. I have a 13" Late 2011 Macbook Pro, i5. 8gb RAM. 500gb HDD.
What I'm doing is replacing my 500gb HDD and moving that to my optical bay just for general storage. I'm going to set up my new SSD as the boot drive. I want to boost my performance for as little money as possible. I know that I can put 16gb RAM in and get significant improvement, but really want to get rid of the HDD as the boot drive. I'm leaning toward getting either the 44gb or 60gb Mercury Electra 6G SSD.
Any suggestions on what size would be best for what I want or any other suggestions are welcome.

I suggest that you get at least a 240 GB SSD. SATA3, of course!
Larger SSDs are generally much faster, and the price is now dropping (to the point that I have just purchased an 1Tb Crucial M500 SSD for less than 400 €). The price difference between a 64 GB SSD and a 240 GB SSD is now minimal, and you will enjoy more space!
Two years ago, as soon as I purchased my late-2011 MBP, I immediately did the same, moving the original 750Gb HD to the optical bay, and installing a 240Gb Vertex-2 SSD in the main bay as system disk.
The space was just enough, as I have Bootcamp and Windows 7, too, so I divided it half-and-half, and a 128Gb storage is just barely enough for either OSX and Wndows-7 64 bits Pro...
You could survive with a 128 GB SSD if you do not need Bootcamp. Indeed, I always recommend to install Bootcamp and Windows 7 to all Mac owners, so you get the best of the two worlds. I love OSX, but for certain tasks Windows is still vastly superior (using Autocad, for example)...
Curiously, instead, I prefer OSX for Office...

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