How to Find Out If Your Sandy Bridge Motherboard Is Affected by Intel's SATA Bug

Intel's recent announcement regarding the SATA chipset design error that made its way into the Cougar Point powered products has caused a stir all over the Web as many users feared they will get the performance loss associated with this bug, but not all motherboards are necessarily affected, and there's an easy way to check if your board has this problem or not.

Brought to our attention be the German Heise website, the method posted below checks to see if the chipset used by your board is based on the B2 revision.

Most motherboards should use this revision of the Cougar Point PCH, but there is a small chance that you own one of the few boards that were shipped before January 9, which feature an older stepping of the chipset.

For starters, the first thing you need to do is to make sure that a storage device (HDD or SSD) is connected to one of the four 3Gbps SATA ports that are presumably affected by the issue.

Next, you have to enter Windows' command line mode, by typing cmd.exe in the Windows 7 or Vista search field available in the start menu (Win XP users go to Start -> Run and type cmd.exe in the Open field).

You should now see a black background window with a flickering prompt.

It is here where you need to type the "wmic idecontroller get deviceid" command which will return the PCI ID of the chipset that contains the storage controller, unless additional IDE or SATA controller are installed.

The result should be something similar to the image on the left.

Although it looks rather cryptic at first sight, we are only interested in the revision number of the chipset, the “REV_xx” field.

If this reads “REV_04” as in the provided example, then your motherboard is based on the B2 revision of the Cougar Point chipset and is affected by the SATA 3Gbps bug, otherwise you are in the clear.

Until now, Asus, Gigabyte and MSI have all published official responses regarding the affected motherboards and other manufacturers and retailers are expected to follow, all of them offering to swap the motherboards once the new B3 revision becomes available in April.