The instant on and off from sleep could be due to a different Intel technology, 'Intel Rapid Start'. You can tell if its also been configured to use this by looking in the bios to see whether 'Intel Rapid Start' has been enabled and in 'Disk Management' whether the SSD has been partitioned with a small hibernate partition.
Can you post a screen shot of 'Disk Management' just to see the whole picture.
I assume your laptop came with w8 to start with then and in that case the recovery partition is likely only to have w8.
Personally whilst things are working I would look into creating a drive image of the recovery partition with something like Clonezilla so that you have this to fall back on. That will allow you to restore the laptop to its original state should you ever wish to, perhaps if you choose to sell it at some point.
Yes it is possible to set up the caching again and is pretty straight forward.
The reason some people are borking reinstalls is if it's using caching then it should be turned off in the Intel Rapid Storage app prior to wiping drives and re-installing, otherwise the SSD will still be the boot with old OS files on it I think but where it doesn't have a file it will look to the hdd and find a different OS too and result in expected issues. When it comes to this take a screen shot of 'Disk Management' screen prior to switching off caching. I'm not sure if the HDD or the SSD stays as the bootable drive before and after switching the caching off.
Also check the size and position of the recovery partition. When I did a laptop at xmas it had the recovery partition at the start of the drive and would have been much better if it were after / to the right of the system partition. If it had been like this I could have shrunk the system partition and used the resulting unallocated space to add to the recovery partition. I was going from Vista to W8 so the original recovery partition was too small for a w8 image, yours might be more generous to start with depending on what was used to create the recovery image there.
Once the caching has been switched off you can use some appropriate ssd tools to do a secure wipe of the ssd (not the hibernate partition if it has one as it will save recreating it again later) rather than formatting it which isn't good for ssd's.
Acquire the latest version Intel Rapid Storage RAID driver, there's a floppy disk version you can save to a usb drive and supply this during the w7 install at the point where you choose the partition to install to.
Before you start the W7 install make sure you've set the hard disk controller to RAID.
You can use the install process when you select the partition to install to, to format the target hdd partition.
There's also another Rapid Storage RAID package which has the app in it which you can download and install after installing W7. You use the app to turn the caching back on. Before you do this you would decide if you want the Intel Rapid Start for fast hibernate. If you do then you need to create a small hibernate partition on the SSD if it isn't already there, which is equal in size to the size of your system RAM, i.e. for 8GB the size of the partition would be 8192 and you would set the id of the partition to '84' upon creation, so if this partition needs to be created it needs to be done in 'diskpart' from a command prompt.
Download the latest Intel Rapid Start driver but before installing it, reboot into the bios and turn this feature on if it isn't already. Reboot into Windows and install Rapid Start and reboot.
Install the Rapid Storage RAID package to get the app installed and go into this and turn on the caching which will give you the option of how much of the SSD to use for this. At this point if you did the Rapid Start first you can just choose to use the whole of the main SSD partition.
Reboot here for good measure, the caching will start to rebuild as you now continue to use the system.
Continue with post install tasks such as acquiring W7 drivers, Windows updates, tweaks, some software then i'd create a new image using the W7 File Recovery option in the Control Panel and save this to the recovery partition.
Then I continue at this point installing software that I might not stay with long term such as Virus software which I wouldn't want in the image if I restore from the image it saves having to then uninstall such software before loading whatever has been chosen as the new solution.
