I once installed XP on Notebook with an SSD. It was unusable. Tried everything my 20 years as a PC Engineer suggested, all to no avail. Sorting the alignment, I used diskpar.exe as it was clean install, resolved ALL my issues. Trust me. This IS worth doing. EXCELLENT thread.

They should, yes. Although I could swear I did a clean install and my drive was still misaligned, so it can't hurt to double check. OS X is probably fine, though, since that all comes pre-partitioned and installed.