It has nothing to do with the drivers
If the firmware plays a part it is unlikely that the SATA drivers are the issue - the firmware must be at fault.
Moreover SATA drivers are not written in the main by motherboard mfrs but by chipset designers in the majority of cases Intel or AMD, and they are not likely to produce cr*p drivers.
OCZ drives based on Sandforce controllers have had compatibility issues with certain newer versions of Intel storage drivers for some time (even the previous generations).
Most likely this relates to Sandforce's so called "secret sauce" which enables their controllers to get such extraordinarily high IO/sec results despite using similar components to everyone else.
They apply a type of compression algorithm to the data written to the drive to reduce the time to read/write and theoretically increase lifetime (conversely writing large quantities of incompressible data e.g. JPEGs will kill one of these drives in zero time - they are only good for OS/software).
I note that Corsair which also sells the same Sandforce drive branded as the "Force" series (essentially all these manufacturers offer the same product re-branded and with tiny firmware variations), has issued a recall of this model due to a fault which affects a small number of drives.
I have had an OCZ Sandforce Vertex 2 drive for a year, which so far performs well with no issues, but I was aware of the problems as well as the slightly "weird" technology used so I didn't update my Intel SATA drivers to the latest version (v10) and stopped myself from buying the new drive version despite very impressive performance, opting for something "safer" i.e. more mainstream instead.