oh this is good news from the blog post and patch, it seemed that data corruption occurred due to pointer from ata driver being set to wrong address when trim is used with raid (in linux kernel). i think only kernel gurus know what this means lol for us users, hopefully with the patch, the black list will be updated later. (not a big deal. we can patch that part manually) by the way which distro are you using?

if your hdd caddy cannot house ssd properly, you might need one to secure it in 3.5" hdd bays. (new casings usually comes with settings for ssd)

yes i use liteon oem ssds also. to me, they're good. liteon is a common name in major brands (mostly higher end laptops and workstations).

it shouldn't be. have you updated the firmware?
the correct sequence should be updating the firmware first. for w7 and up the install media will create default partition layouts and do formatting for you, so you don't need to do anything.

no such issue encountered    using native windows 10 USB3 drivers, on windows 8.1 previously no issue as well.

that's weird. what about trying to do 'align all partitions'? http://www.partitionwizard.com/help/align-...partitions.html

just to be sure, check the alignment manually. press win key + r and type 'msinfo32'. goto system summary > components > storage > disks. get the value for 'partition starting offset' of your ssd and then use calculator to divide it with 4096. if the result is a whole number, then the alignment is ok. if it's a decimal, then it's bad.

if aligning all partitions also doesn't work, i guess you should find out other ways online (there are many ways to do 4k alignment). i use this free minitool partition wizard previously and it worked for me.

worst comes to worst, use diskpart > clean on ssd and start over. (it's a sure-fix for 4k alignment)

It depends on os. Newer os like w8.x/10 will do this automatically. However it never hurt to verify the 4K alignment if you're in doubt.