Now I've also found this thread, which mentions the possibility of the installment of an ordinary 2.5' SATA SSD into the laptop.

Therefore I am looking for alternatives, as I am not willing to pay this ridiculous premium for Apple-compatible hardware. I've again done some research and found this, which is unfortunately almost double the price of ordinary mSATA or m.2 SSDs, which are readily available on the internet these days. Unfortunately that's far from enough and I am considering a further upgrade.

If you are having problems now you may want to visit an Apple Store or Apple authorized service center to have them replace it for free! Apple has been quietly replacing them.I've done some research before, which led to the installation of an SD card adapter, together with a 128GB microSD card, which doubles the available storage capacity (original SSD storage was 128GB). Here is the IFIXIT guide you'll need to follow: MacBook Pro 13' Unibody Mid 2012 Hard Drive Cable Replacement. This series has a known issue with its HD SATA cable, it would be wise to replace it when you replace the HD. To setup your new SSD you'll need an adapter like this: Starch 2.5' SATA to USB adapter In addition you'll need to download from the Apps Store a copy of the OS installer.As to updates, depending on your OS you are currently running now you may only need to make sure you are running the latest. You'll likely need to enable it which is quite easy. One of the issues is how the OS & drive knows what happening with a given piece of data that is no longer needed. 3rd party SSD's have a couple of ways to do garbage collection internally within the drive.The only requirements is getting a unit that fits -} A standard 2.5' 9 mm drive is all you need.On the most part the only real difference between the different units is the speed of the read & write speed unless you are coding or doing renderings the speed difference won't make much difference.

As to who's SSD in your case there is no real issues as you have a 6.0 Gb/s SATA based system.

You may want to make the jump to a 1TB drive to be safe. I recommend having 1/3 of the drive free on the smaller SSD's (256 GB or smaller) and 1/4 free on drives larger than 512 GB. If you get too small a SSD you run the risk of the drive failing prematurely. Unlike HD's SSD need free space to prevent wearing. Before you go down this path how much stuff do you have on your HD now? That will have a big bearing on what size of SSD you'll need to get.

Mid 2012 macbook pro 13 ssd upgrade