System freeze when transferring large files (libata)

["Arve Knudsen" <aknuds-1@broadpark.no>]

I've been having this problem lately when transferring large amounts of  
data to my Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 SATA 120GB drive, which is connected  
to a Promise SATA150 TX2 Plus controller. It happened once with an -mm  
kernel, but I figured it was probably down to instability in the -mm  
patchset. However it just happened to me again with a vanilla 2.6.6  
kernel, when untarring a backup. The system froze completely, I couldn't  
even use alt+sysrq+b to reboot. Are there any known issues with the  
Promise driver that can lead to such lockups? I've recently run a disc  
check which found no problems (it wasn't Maxtor's own though, but  
Seagate's as the Maxtor tools won't work with the controller).

Thanks

Arve Knudsen