If Scott reads this, yes, this pertains to my DH67CL board with an unreliable SATA III port.
If a SATA port becomes flaky, then the chipset is likely becoming flaky, as Scott said. Given that work=heat and heat degrades electronics, is there any point in trying to offload some of the chipset's functions or is it just shuffling deck chairs on the Intel version of the Titanic? Specifically:
- Adding a NIC card and disabling the on-board LAN in BIOS would shift Ethernet from the on-board NIC to the card.
- Adding a SATA controller add-on card would allow the DVD/CD and data drives to bypass the SATA controller in the chipset, though I'd still need at least one SATA port on the board to boot. There's a few cards with Marvell controllers that look attractive.
Both of these proposals would increase work for the PCIe channels which the chipset also manages, so is this a good trade-off?
Also, how would adding a graphics card affect the chipset? I would imagine, not being an Intel insider, that using Intel graphics would be the most efficient from a chipset point of view.