The past days have seen some of the world’s biggest component manufacturers scrambling to find solutions to Intel’s Sandy Bridge recall. The situation is becoming clearer, with most deciding to offer customers free swaps when the revised P67 and H67 boards begin appearing in April.
For now you can work around the issue by simply plugging all hard disks and optical drives into the unaffected SATA 6Gb/s ports on your motherboard. But Asus and Gigabyte are aware not everyone knows how to do that, so both have come up with ways to educate less tech-savvy consumers.
Gigabyte is offering its customers a small utility (left) to detect if a motherboard is faulty: simply download the Gigabyte 6 Series SATA Check tool and you’ll be told if you’re using the affected ports, with guidance as to which ports to use instead.
Asus has come up with a more basic solution, sending us the above close-up photo to illustrate exactly which ports could prove problematic. As you can see, Intel-controlled SATA 6Gb/s sockets are safe to use, as are the SATA 6Gb/s ports controlled by the third-party Marvell chip by which Asus adds more ports to its boards. Only the four SATA 3Gb/s ports are faulty.
Both are clear and simple methods of helping those who may be perplexed by all the talk of SATA 3Gb/s and SATA 6Gb/s. If you’re using a motherboard made by MSI, Intel or anyone else, these precise solutions won’t apply, but if you dig out your motherboard manual and use the photo above for guidance, you should be able to figure it out quite easily.