Techie jellies: what was the "Sandy Bridge" chipset problem with PCs?

It was a problem specific to the Cougar Point chipset (P67 and H67 motherboards) which affected the SATA 3 Gb/s ports causing their links to fail over time. The problem was identified and resolved with new motherboards shipped back in April.

Buy from a reputable source and you should be fine now.

You can be sure it doesn’t have this problem today. Just be wary that not all i5s and i7s are necessarily Sandy Bridge. Some still run on the older 1156 socket.