Best Way To Wipe / Reinstall SSD (Intel X25-M)

Good Morning!

I have had my Intel X25-M for a while now and also have run the firmware update from a couple of months ago that fixed some of it's issues. I'm about to wipe my system for a reinstall and want it to be back to the speed it was when I first got the drive. I have a couple of questions if someone could please help.

1. Just ran benchmarks and they are half the speed that they are posted on various websites + from benchmarks I ran myself on my X25-M when I got it long ago. I know that there are a lot of different variables, but what is the best way to wipe the info to start again? I ask this because before the firmware released by Intel, a few articles (one here i believe) suggested to do a sort of low-level format to clear out a cache.

2. The system that I use it in is an Alienware m9750 laptop. I also have another drive for data which is a 500gb 5400 plain-jane drive. Is it advisable to keep my page file on the secondary drive even though it's much slower? I know that page files have a lot of read / writes so I'd guess yes. - Speaking of - I do have 4 gigs RAM on a 64-bit Windows 7 system. Should I even use a page file?

Any other suggestions to improve anything would be much appreciated. Thanks so much and hope you have a great day!

Ben

Thanks - I appreciate your help. I did try to disable AHCI before, but it appears that even though my BIOS is more extensive than others - I couldn't find it.