It looks like we will talk about Intel's Sandy Bridge motherboard recall for quite a while. Gigabyte just sent out a press release where it said that it has software that can test whether your board is good or bad, of course it tests only P67 and H67 motherboards.

Gigabyte is trying to sell the story that only users with more than two SATA devices might be affected, as SATA 3 ports are not affected. We like the choice of words where Gigabyte tells its customers that “not so important devices like DVD rom (Nicht so wichtige Geräte (z.B. DVD-ROM) / translated from German press release ed.)” should get attached to SATA 2 affected port. We don’t want to prejudge here but installing from a DVD on a bad SATA 2 port can also result in a very long and bad day.

So, Gigabyte was so nice to come up with a software simply called GIGABYTE 6 Series SATA Check, available here.

The software can tell you if you have drives attached to affected SATA 2 ports but it cannot tell you if you have an affected motherboard. Gigabyte clearly tells you that there is no way to guarantee if you are one of the five percent of all affected boards but even then try to avoid use of SATA 2. Remember it might take up to three years for this port to fail and for most it will never happen.

The small program will simply tell you to avoid SATA 2 ports and try to plug all to SATA 3. SATA 3 is backward compatible with SATA 2 devices and they will work just fine. If you don't use affected SATA 2 ports software will simply tell you “SATA configuration (is) OK”. If you have devices attached on SATA 2 ports the software will tell you “(Please) move 1 or 2 devices from (the) Intel PCH SATA 2.0 ports to the free SATA 3.0 ports“.

In the third scenario, if you use both SATA 2 and SATA 3 ports, the program advises that (“Use of (the) Intel PCH SATA 2.0 ports is not recommended”). We are quite sure that other manufacturer are also working on a similar solution to tell you what ports are you using. The alternative is simple, just open your case, and see it for yourself as SATA 2 and SATA 3 are usually painted in different colours, just consult your manual.