Is my SSD bad? Need help! Severe problems!

Hey guys, hopefully you can help me out here! Bear with me as this will be long. Anyways, I have a 60gb OCZ SSD that I replaced with an 840 Evo about a year ago. After reading about using an SSD as a caching drive I decided I wanted to throw the OCZ back into my system and use it to cache my 1TB HDD. First off getting my system to see the OCZ drive was a pain and while trying to setup stuff it would constantly drop off and not be seen by windows or BIOS. Anyways after switching the system to RAID from AHCI with registry edits and moving the drives to different SATA ports (some of them were on a Asmedia controller I think) I finally got Intel RST to see all three drives in my system and allow me to accelerate my HDD. After telling it to use the OCZ drive to accelerate my HDD it said I needed to reboot. When rebooting for some reason it ran check disk and then rebooted again and the drive was gone. So I decided to reboot again and try to get the drive to show up again and somewhere in there I believe it totally wiped my HDD partition and shot my windows install in the head since my user profile became inaccessible. Tried to recover through safe mode but after a few recover attempts in there safe mode became inaccessible. Anyways when I went to try to reinstall the OS I could not get it to install until I switched back to AHCI mode. But since I'm going through the effort I wanted to do it proper for RAID mode. So I got a RST driver and attempted to reinstall the OS like that. With the driver it allowed me to attempt to install the OS in RAID mode but failed. After which I decided to unplug the OCZ and when I tried to reinstall windows on my 840 in RAID mode it went without a hitch. I didn't have to use the RST driver either (Or maybe windows setup still saw it?) But now I'm leery of attempting to plug that OCZ back into the system since it seemed like messing with it destroyed the system.

Sorry for the long post but I wanted to be descriptive as possible so you guys can give me your best thoughts with minimal further questions. Also any tips on recovering my 1TB HDD will be helpful as I have yet to write anything on it or even setup a new partition.

System specs:
i7 4770k @4.1ghz
Boot drive: 840 Evo 250gb
Storage: WD 1TB HDD
Other SSD: OCZ Agility 2 60gb
mobo: Asus Maximus VII Gene
MSI GTX 970
8gb Corsair Vengeance
Win 7 Home Premium

Sorry again for the long post. Thanks for any of your time and help!

Yes your ssd is going bad. I've had similar problems in the past with a 120 gb sata 2 kingston this is typically exactly how they die. The early ssds don't have anywhere near the life of current ones. I think it's worth noting there are now ssds made specifically for caching.

A dying SSD can take out the rest of the drives with it (in terms of data that is)? I thought it would just stop communicating with the system or something. Which it did do where it'll sometimes not be seen by just windows or by both BIOS and windows but I didn't think it could screw things up that bad.

Windows likes to be dumb and spread important files across drives for no fucking reason which would explain the issues, however it could be a motherboard issue now that I think of it. There's people here who know more about hardware than i do but that's my 2 cents.

I think the mobo is okay since as soon as I unplug the drive the system starts functioning fine. It doesn't take anywhere near as long to POST and I was able to reinstall windows without any problems with the SATA mode set to RAID and it saw my other HDD and SSD just fine. I did have the entire user folder moved from the SSD to the HDD so maybe there was some critical files there that screwed windows up when the HDD decided to just list it's entire capacity as unallocated space. But how would a failed cache drive screw up the HDD? When the OCZ drive dropped from the system again it was right after I set it to cache the HDD but it still let me boot and see both my normal drives and it just came up with an error saying caching was currently disabled since the cache drive was offline.

Also come to think of it I think I had a few problems with the OCZ drive back when I had a MSI Z87 mobo in my system and the OCZ was my boot and I had 2 HDD in RAID 0 so all signs point to the SSD being bad I just want to know how it can make the rest of the system blow it's brains out. On a side note though I was smart enough to not repartition my HDD or write anything on it so the recovery program I'm running so far has found/reconstructed a lot of the data on the HDD.