I had a few of my systems give similar symptoms once... I upgraded to a kernel that includes JaromÃr's work with... NCQ and DMA.
Some of the changes seemed to rattle loose glitches in the sata controller code on some boards, I had better luck with ahcisata, but when we have those interrupt storms that I believe there is a PR out for... drives seem to get stuck in stile with raidframe. I have had some video glitches too with larger x11 apps, firefox or gtk3... where things will stop refreshing unless I swap out and back into the wscon, or have the window manager reset. It may just be some other bug that the interrupt storms make more noticeable, I have no clue.... It happened a lot on a dell I had that was giving some things back in acpi which the kernel was barfing at (It was a while ago and I don't have a log to show), but when I updated the firmware and stopped getting the acpi errors seemed to mostly even out the interrupts... and the errors stopped. I'd suggest peeking to see if you can update that, and perhaps if you can, slide another brand of drive controller in? On my SATA machine with seven drives... I know I have onboard and a four port card in and understand that may be impractical. -Brandon
