Intel Sandy Bridge SATA issue and the Aussie Flood Dream System

Last night you probably heard all the news about Intel only just discovering an issue with the Sandy Bridge chipset. We are using the GA-P67A-UD7 motherboard in the Aussie Flood Appeal Dream System and that is one of the many affected products on the market.



The issue of degrading performance and possibly even data corruption over time is seen when using the SATA II ports on motherboards that are powered by the Intel P67 chipset. The Intel SATA III ports are not affected, nor are the SATA ports powered by the two Marvell 88SE9128 chips that are featured on the GA-P67A-UD7.

The Dream System comes with a total of five drives: two Corsair Force F120 120GB SSDs and three Western Digital Black 2TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s HDDs. Our solution to dodge the problem altogether is running both Corsair SSDs on the SATA III ports (still in RAID 0) and two out of the three Western Digital hard drives on the Marvell controlled SATA ports. As for the third drive from WD, Thermaltake has stepped up to the plate once again and is throwing in one of their Max 5G USB 3.0 external hard drive enclosures. We did intend on adding in a high-end PCI-E RAID controller to take care of this issue, but all of the PCI Express x16 slots are accounted for by use of the three SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 6970 2GB video cards in lovely Crossfire.

As of now, that brings the total value of the Dream System up to $4930.80 USD and the winner will not need to fear any potential storage issues later down the track. It is unknown at this stage if GIGABYTE will provide the winner of the Dream System with a refreshed and error-free GA-P67A-UD7 once they received new revision P67 Sandy Bridge chipsets from Intel, but we will keep you posted.