(1) Recommend either the samsung 830 or the Curcial M4 - have both. Performance, real life - very little difference. Samsung probably better (closer to Intel), But have had no problems with pair of M4s in laptop. The 830 has only been in about a week, it replaced a Agility III as a OS + Program disk.
(2) as to platform. Most benchmarks are mostly based on the Intel chipset and use iaSTor driver. Benchmarks will show a difference, But the real question is How that translates to real life. Appearenatly Synthetic benchmark defferences between various sata III ssds do NOT show much difference in real life. In fact there is NOT a big diff between using a SATA III SSD on a SATA III port vs puting it on a SATA II port. One of the reasons is Sequencial read/writes are the least important matrix for a OS + Program drive.