HATS OFF TO Intel for pulling one of the most devious PR spin and coverups of the year with their chipset problems explanation. While it may be a desperate and masterful obfuscation job, if you poke a little under the surface, you can see how badly they screwed up, and how little of the truth actually came out.
Updated: Tuesday, February 1, 2011 Bottom of the article
To say I don't buy the explanation that Intel provided is understating the issue immensely, only the level of the coverup is still somewhat vague. The reason isn't that it doesn't make sense, but once you start looking at questions about how and why, things fall apart. One complicating factor might be explainable, a dozen, not a chance. The list is far closer to a dozen than one.
Lets start with the problem, Lars wrote it up, but a few more things have come to light since. Short story, the Cougar Point chipset has a problem with slow failures on the SATA-3 ports, but not on the SATA-6 ports. This means ports 0-1 are just fine, but ports 2-5 are quite possibly hosed. The overwhelming majority of PCs will never use more than 2 SATA ports, so even if you have an affected board, chances are that you will never notice.
More encouraging for Intel, the number of laptops out there that use more than two SATA ports, either internally or externally, is just about zero. If a laptop maker is going to use two SATA ports, they will obviously use the 6Gbps ones. It is questionable if those ports are even available on some laptop SKUs, so it would be surprising if laptops were affected by this in large numbers.
That is where the good stuff tends to end, and the fishy explanations, or lack thereof, begin. Lets start with the problem itself. The SATA-3 ports will slowly start to degrade over time, and the error rate will grow until the link dies, and there is no recovery. This is supposed to hit 5-15% of the chipsets, and it is pretty random as to which ones will die.
You're probably right.
