Comment 108 for bug 285892

I have the same problem on a Asus E35M1-I DELUXE with two samsung spinpoints F1's and one F4 ecogreen, running Ubuntu 11.04 Linux 2.6.38-8-server:

[68623.060362] ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
[68623.060521] ata2.00: failed command: WRITE DMA EXT
[68623.060626] ata2.00: cmd 35/00:00:9f:a2:05/00:04:40:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 524288 out
[68623.060630] res 40/00:ff:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/40 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
[68623.060896] ata2.00: status: { DRDY }
[68623.060976] ata2: hard resetting link
[68633.090302] ata2: softreset failed (device not ready)
[68633.090423] ata2: hard resetting link
[68643.120265] ata2: softreset failed (device not ready)
[68643.120387] ata2: hard resetting link
[68653.750324] ata2: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
[68678.170307] ata2: softreset failed (device not ready)
[68678.170429] ata2: limiting SATA link speed to 1.5 Gbps
[68678.170439] ata2: hard resetting link
[68683.380272] ata2: softreset failed (device not ready)
[68683.380391] ata2: reset failed, giving up
[68683.380471] ata2.00: disabled
[68683.380491] ata2.00: device reported invalid CHS sector 0
[68683.380524] ata2: EH complete

Turning off NCQ didn't help, Smartctl and fsck didn't reveal any problems.
Pretty annoying bug, which lingers around for a long time.