Intel Admits SATA Problems with Sandy Bridge Chipsets

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
Looking to build or purchase a Sandy Bridge PC? After an announcement made by Intel today, you may want to hold off. According to the company, the chipsets that support Sandy Bridge (H67/P67) have launched with a fault that can cause storage issues down the road. Whether that means the SATA capabilities just die, or the drives themselves become affected, we're not sure.


Read the rest of our post here and discuss it here!
 

Optix

Basket Chassis
Staff member
Suddenly I love my H55 again. Everybody is probably cursing Intel right now but kudos for them not keeping it a secret. Looks like I'll be holding out for a little bit.

Any word on what any of the manufacturers plan on doing with the defective stock?
 

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
Cursing them is silly. Like in Anandtech's example, this is like Microsoft's RRoD issue except Intel is accepting responsibility immediately. Granted, Xbox's aren't used in mission critical situations, but to imagine Intel having such a recall even 3 months later from now would be a significantly larger mess all around.

Still, this recall is going to be huge, and completely dwarfs the FDIV defect issue Intel had their with Pentium Pro processors... it's going to be interesting to see how the major motherboard manufacturers handle the individual recalls.

It's not hard for manufacturers to remove the BGA package chipset and re-solder a fixed chipset on motherboards, but the question is will they bother due to time and costs involved? Unless they could figure out a way to automate much of the process it would require a fair amount of manpower to handle the sheer volume.
 

Optix

Basket Chassis
Staff member
I suspect we will see quite a few boards with a rev.2.0 sticker attached to them if the manufacturers do remove the chipset and replace it with the updated version.
 

Optix

Basket Chassis
Staff member
So am I...it just so happens that I'll probably be ready by the time the 1st gen chipsets are phased out.
 
Last edited:
Top