Early adopters of the Intel Sandy Bridge architecture and its corresponding P67/H67-based motherboards were certainly caught off-guard by the recent announcement of a problem in the SATA 3.0G substrate leading to a massive recall of the chipsets. Turns out motherboard manufacturers were just as surprised as everyone else when the announcement was made. Now that the companies have had a couple of days to gather their thoughts, details on repair/replacement plans are starting to emerge.
So far, ECS (e-mailed directly to us), Gigabyte, MSI, and ASUS have made announcements regarding their motherboards, and the announcements are nearly identical (not that this is a bad thing):
- Sales of current stock (B2 chipset stepping) is suspended immediately
- On availability of the B3 chipset stepping, manufacturers will replace affected products with new boards (expected around April)
- Manufacturers are working with their distributor and reseller channels on returns and replacements of current stock
- Customers in the US have the following options:
- Return the product at the original point of purchase for a refund
- RMA the product to the manufacturer once replacement parts are available (again around April). ECS and MSI have both explicitly stated they will cover shipping costs both ways for customers choosing this option.
In the cases of MSI and ASUS, additional details on notebooks based on Sandy Bridge are available. Owners of MSI HM67 gaming notebooks are eligible to receive an upgrade to MSI’s next generation gaming notebook upon availability. Asus will repair affected notebook models under its standard warranty repair service.
Regardless of manufacturer, until replacement parts are available there is a simple workaround. Intel has stated that the SATA 6.0G ports are not affected by the problem; simply attaching your devices to these ports instead of the SATA 3.0G ports will avoid any issues with the recalled parts.
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