Patrik Jonsson wrote:

Hi all,
this may not be the best list for this question, but I figure that the
number of disks connected to users here should be pretty big...

I upgraded from 2.6.17-rc4 to 2.6.18.3 about a week ago, and I've since
had 3 drives kicked out of my 10-drive RAID5 array. Previously, I had no
kicks over almost a year. The kernel message is:

ata7.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
ata7.00: (BMDMA stat 0x20)
ata7.00: tag 0 cmd 0xc8 Emask 0x1 stat 0x41 err 0x4 (device error)
ata7: EH complete

Any ideas or thought would be appreciated,

SMART?

Read the manpage and then try running:
smartctl -data -S on /dev/...
and
smartctl -data -s on /dev/...

Then look at your smartd timing and see if it's related; possibly just do a
manual smartd poll.

I've had smart/libata problems (well, no, glitches) for about 2 years now but as
the irq handler occasionally says "no one cared" ;)

It may well not be your problem but...

David