Comment 61 for bug 75295

This still occurs after having flashed the TS-L632D to bios A01 (Acer, from toshibaer's site), as well as having done a motherboard BIOS update also.

I may have found a way to trigger this very quickly. I put in CD-RW media in the drive, and launched Serpentine to burn a series of files to CD:
system nearly froze. Difficult to get a root shell, and needed to both kill hald-addon-storage and reset the drive through hdparm.

Does anyone know how to decrease hal's polling interval ? This wold help, until the issue is fixed in both the kernel & hal (I hope such fixes will be bckported.)

Snips from dmesg, nothing new.
...
[ 1.956000] ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
[ 4.824000] ide0: BM-DMA at 0x3080-0x3087, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio
[ 4.824000] ide1: BM-DMA at 0x3088-0x308f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:pio
[ 4.824000] Probing IDE interface ide0...
[ 5.828000] ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
[ 5.844000] Probing IDE interface ide1...
[ 7.252000] ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
...
[ 151.648000] hdc: status timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
[ 151.648000] ide: failed opcode was: unknown
...
[ 3593.800000] hdc: status timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
[ 3593.800000] ide: failed opcode was: unknown
[ 3593.800000] hdc: drive not ready for command
[ 3593.800000] hdc: DMA disabled
[ 3593.852000] hdc: ATAPI reset complete