Detecting SATA 300 Sandy Bridge Performance Degradation

The Intel fiasco is quite the topic of a lot of discussion, if you like to try and see whether or not your SATA 300 controller on your H67/P67 motherboard is showing early signs of degradation, there in fact is an easy way.

I know a lot of you guys have HD Tune software right ? You can pick up the trial version and see for yourself. That software has a HEALTH feature and checks out several SMART features of the HDD installed. Intel estimates 5% performance degradation caused due to data transfer errors over a period of 3 years. To identify the issues starting check a HDD on both the SATA 300 and SATA 600 controller.

To the left an HDD connected at the SATA 300 controller already showing one warning, to the right the HDD on a SATA 600 controller showing no issues.

Download HD Tune trial software

BTW we ran the test several times ourselves yet to date have not been able to reproduce an error. Thanks go out ot to lab501 for the screenshots.