Patriot Pyro SE SSD Issues

Hey there.

Recently I've begun to have issues with my computer. As of Monday, the 25th, it had its first freeze and upon reboot BIOS could not find my SSD (the disk I use to boot with, I also run a 2 TB hard drive for storage). A few hours later, it was able to find the SSD again and booted like it would normally. Since then, the problem has recurred and has progressively gotten worse (less system up-time before freezes) and very recently, the later half of today, instead of simply freezing the computer would freeze and then display the "Windows is preparing safety precautions" screen before rebooting.

I've been able to update the firmware on the SSD (today, two days after the issue started) but have not yet updated the motherboard drivers (motherboard is a GIGABYTE Z68MA-D2H-B3). SSD is only 2 months old, a Patriot Pyro SE SSD 60 gb. I run Windows 7 64 bit. Through research I've gathered that the cause could be either a bad SSD, malware, or driver/firmware issues (however, to me it seems the driver/firmware issue would not seem to be the cause as the system worked flawlessly for about two months before the issue began), however, I am not a computer expert and could be going down a totally wrong path and be misunderstanding my problem completely!!  

Any guidance that anyone can give me towards troubleshooting what the issue is and/or how to fix it would be so greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance,
Tim.
PS. (First time posting and if there is a more appropriate forum for me to post this post in, I apologize)