I just got an SSD drive, as well as new motherboard, and was having trouble installing Xubuntu onto it. The drive was detected fine when I was booted into an OS, but not during the install process itself.
Turns out that you have to go into the BIOS and change the controller (in my case, the GSATA3 controller, since I plugged the SSD into that) to use AHCI[1], rather than IDE[2].
This happened with my Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3 and OCZ Agility 3 60GB SSD
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Host_Controller_Interface
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA#IDE_and_ATA-1
Stichomythia 