[OC Maximus]

anandtech article

Interestingly enough the problem doesn’t affect ports 1 & 2 on the 6-series chipset. Remember that Intel has two 6Gbps ports and four 3Gbps ports on P67/H67, only the latter four are impacted by this problem.


Intel's DP67BG—The blue SATA ports on the right are 6Gbps, the black ones are 3Gbps. The Blue ports are unaffected by the bug.

If you’re a current Sandy Bridge user and want to be sure you don’t have any problems until you can get replacement hardware, stick to using the 6Gbps ports on your board (which should be the first two ports).

The Fix

The SATA bug exists in hardware and there’s no way to provide a driver or firmware update that can fix it. The fix requires a metal layer change, which will result in a new hardware stepping (resulting in the ~3 week delay before replacement hardware is ready).