Comment 12 for bug 120839

i've been getting a similar error for about a year now on my laptop. The symptom is that the system will freeze for about 45 seconds, and will respond to nothing during that time. Afterwards it snaps out of it and returns to normal operations. When it started it was happening about once per hour, but with the newer gutsy releases it's been happening every 5-10 minutes, which makes using interactive programs extremely annoying. dmesg says:

[17063.276179] ata1.01: qc timeout (cmd 0xa0)
[17063.276201] ata1.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
[17063.276216] ata1.01: cmd a0/00:00:00:00:20/00:00:00:00:00/b0 tag 0 cdb 0x43 data 12 in
[17063.276221] res 51/20:03:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 Emask 0x5 (timeout)
[17068.312038] ata1: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0xd1)
[17073.292096] ata1: device not ready (errno=-16), forcing hardreset
[17073.292104] ata1: soft resetting port
[17073.644198] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
[17073.832048] ata1.01: configured for UDMA/25
[17073.832064] ata1: EH complete

It's an Acer Aspire 9410 laptop. hdparm says:

ATA device, with non-removable media
        Model Number: WDC WD800UE-22HCT0
        Serial Number: WD-WXE406119580
        Firmware Revision: 09.07D09

i'm running the current (as of today) gutsy, and have been updating regularly for over a year (mainly in the hope that this problem would go away).