Be sure to check the startup disk setting after you are successfully booting from the new drive.
We just replaced the original drive in a Core 2 Duo White MacBook (2008, 4.1) with a 256GB Crucial M500 SSD, following some instructions on Apple Support Communities (search for “Second way”) for moving the data*. Our power-button-to-productivity benchmark of bootup+login+Chrome-window-appears+Word-window-appears was 2:36 with the original drive and 1:08 with the SSD drive. But that 1:08 included a surprising 25-30 second delay after the screen lit up on power-on but before the Apple logo appeared. There are multiple causes described in this article, but the simple issue for us was selection of the startup disk in System Preferences. After selecting the Crucial SSD as the startup disk, the annoying delay at power up was gone. Thus our power-button-to-productivity time is more like 0:40, down from the original 2:36.
*Nuance with moving the data via Disk Utility Restore: When initially booting from the original drive over USB I selected “Macintosh HD” instead of “Recovery HD”. Disk Utility wouldn’t let me restore from the original drive to the new drive. I had to choose “Recovery HD” instead of “Macintosh HD” from the boot menu. That led to a simple menu (including Disk Utility) instead of my normal OS X environment, and then I was able to restore from the original drive.