"After reassembly, boot the Mini into Lion Recovery and use disk utility to erase your SSD. Then install Lion on your SSD. After rebooting, go into system preferences>startup disk and choose your SSD as the startup disk."
NO! STOP! DON'T DO IT!!!!!!!!!!!
Do NOT use the Disk Utility on the Recovery partition. Boot your Mini normally and use the Disk Utility that you access through your Applications/Utilities folder. Use Disk Utility to create a new Single Partition (Mac OS Journaled) on your new drive and verify that it can be seen in Finder. After that, Install OS X using Command - R and specifying the new SSD drive. After reboot restore from your old disk and Bob's your Uncle.
