[Katana1000S]

Hi, I have three SSD's now, first one was an OCz Vertex 2 with Sandforce controller it must be getting on for over two years old now, no issues whatsoever.

Last year I bought an OCz Agility 3 60 GB and a OCz 3 Vertex 256 GB for FSX, these had sandforce controllers too but I had issues with the Vertex being detected at a cold boot sometimes and that was with flashing to the latest firmware of the time, others had these issues too on many different boards ... if I got a boot and no Vertex 256 GB getting detected I'd shut the PC down straight away and it always picked it up the next time, fast forward to about a month ago and I've built a new six core machine and took the opportunity to flash both drives firmware to a newer 2.22 I think it was, and no cold boot detection issues now thankfully ... OCz offered to RMA it for me, but reading between the lines I knew I would get a refurb back and also that they would eventually fix the existing problem and I could work around the problem until then, that to be honest hardly happened, maybe one in ten cold boots my Vertex would not get detected, restarts from windows was fine, and now that I have flashed to latest firmware for my new build its never happened.

But Sandforce controllers did hurt the reputation of OCz and Corsair and others who used this controller on their SSD's, they worked hard to fix it though, so now OCz have introduced Vertex 4 and they use a different controller than Sandforce, albeit slightly (not so you would notice) slower than Sandforce.

That's my experience on the hardware side, I'm sure you know not to defrag an SSD you can damage it doing that, the jury is still out on should you have a swap file on an SSD, we used to be worried about limited writes, but this is now looking like unfounded worrys, I'd happily put a swap file on a modern SSD ... Win 7 has TRIM support that makes up for lack of defrag BTW.

Thats the gist of it, if I can help more I will.

EDIT: and Igo is right, if you have the option to use AHCI in the bios, do that before installing Win 7 although you can enable it afterwards with a reg tweak or something.