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As you may have heard, Intel identified an issue with the P67 chipset in a recent press release which caused a loss of data over time with the 3Gb/s SATA ports. I recently built a Sandy Bridge PC with a 3Gb/s hard drive.

I'm pretty ticked, but they said using only the 6Gb/s slots is a valid workaround. Would this be alright? What about with this DVD drive?

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Btw I totally feel your pain, took me 8 hours to get my watercooling installed only to hear my motherboard might be flawed? :-( – Ivo Flipse♦ Feb 2 '11 at 7:36
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Yes, they're perfectly backwards compatible.

To quote Wikipedia:

Also, the new standard is backwards compatible with SATA 3 Gbit/s. [14]

Given that SATA is a standard interface, it doesn't matter whether it's a hard drive or disk drive, it should work with every SATA compatible device.

But off course you won't get more performance if the drive itself doesn't allow anything above 3 Gb/s. However, if you have any (fast) SSDs it would actually be a good idea to plug them into those ports.

If you don't feel like replacing the motherboard and have some room left in your case, you could get a PCI SATA adapter, that way you can avoid using the potentially flawed SATA 3 ports entirely

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Sweet! I don't think I want to spend the money on a SATA adapter, though, as the company I bought the mobo from said they're extending the return deadline to whenever Intel releases the fixed versions, so I should be able to replace it for the cost of shipping. Still inconvenient...but whatever. Regardless, that's some sage advice. Thanks again, @Ivo! – Arthur Skirvin Feb 2 '11 at 19:16
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