I have an SD-VIA-1A2S PCI card with 2 sata ports (and one ATA-133 that isn't used). Two new Western Digital Caviar Green drives (WD10EARS 1TB) throw repeated errors in kern.log (removed date/time/host info for brevity):

[    7.376475] ata2.00: exception Emask 0x12 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x1000500 action 0x6
[    7.376480] ata2.00: BMDMA stat 0x5
[    7.376483] ata2: SError: { UnrecovData Proto TrStaTrns }
[    7.376489] ata2.00: cmd c8/00:40:20:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 32768 in
[    7.376490]          res 51/84:2f:20:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x12 (ATA bus error)
[    7.376493] ata2.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
[    7.376495] ata2.00: error: { ICRC ABRT }
[    7.376504] ata2: hard resetting link

I'm using Ubuntu 9.04 - 2.6.28-18-generic, though I have tried live cds of Ubuntu 9.10, Fedora 12 and OpenSUSE 11.2 - all running various 2.6.31 kernels - and all received the same error.

Based on testing these drives and this card in two other machines and combos of connecting the drives directly to the motherboard or the add-in card, I'm relatively convinced that it's the VIA chipset that is the problem. Another computer that also has an onboard VIA SATA chipset (like the add-in card) produces the same errors when the drives are directly on that motherboard. I have been able to verify that the drives are perfectly good, and I tried everything I can think of in terms of swapping cables, psu isn't overloaded, etc.

The error happens on boot once or twice, after using fdisk on the drive once or twice, and constantly when attempting to sync a new mdadm raid 1 array created on the two drives.

Any thoughts on where to go from here - driver/kernel wise?

I'm completely open to buying a new PCI add-in card if someone can recommend one with 2 internal sata ports that works well in Debian/Ubuntu.

Thanks!