Intel Haswell B85 (8th gen Intel) incompatible with SandForce 1000 family SSDs like OCZ Vertex 2

It took me quite some time and tinkering to find out that apparently the Intel B85 SATA controller does not work with the OCZ Vertex 2 SSD.

The problem exhibits as the drive sometimes playing dead on system startup or random I/O errors to the device in the Windows system protocol as well as random I/O errors for the device when using a Live Linux USB session. I suppose it is a specific controller-to-controller issue, because the OCZ SSD just works fine in at least two other (non-Intel) PCs and other non-Vertex2 SSDs just work fine with the Intel B85 mainboard.

Finally I found posts like on notebookreview , overclock.net that tell us the Sandforce SF-1000 family controllers do not play along with the Intel 8th gen Haswell SATA.

Hardware used:

• Gigabyte B85M-D2V, BIOS Version F1
• OCZ Vertex 2, unknown Firmware

I hope my findings are useful for others.