Cause:
The issue is the result of Aggressive Link State Power Management (ALPM) on the PCI-Express bus negotiating a lower power state for the link between the controller and disk when there is no activity. When ALPM works, disk requests are queued, the serial link revived, and the queued requests are sent to the relevant disk; this requires a disk that supports ALPM.

Resolution:
Modify the advanced settings of your active power management scheme in Windows to turn PCI Express Link State Power Management off.

Commentary:
Searching for a solution yielded a number of possibilities.

Setting the value of:

as discussed by Derek Seaman did not resolve my issue.

Renaming:

to

as suggested by Paul's Computer Service was also ineffective. At the time I was running the latest set of drivers for my platform. Caveat emptor: the solution I outlined in this article worked for me.

References:
Intel CS-025783 - Possible issues with Windows Vista* and Intel® RAID
Windows 7 Intel SATA/AHCI Lockups
Intel® Matrix Storage Manager Bug

Workaround:

1. Click Start, point to Run, and type cmd.
2. Click Ok
3. At the command prompt, type the following command and then press ENTER:
   set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
4. Type the following command at the command prompt and then press ENTER:
   start devmgmt.msc
5. Troubleshoot the devices and drivers in Device Manager. NOTE: Click Show hidden devices on the View menu in Device Managers before you can see devices that are not connected to the computer.

Note that when you close the command prompt window, Window clears the devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 variable that you set in step 2 and prevents ghosted devices from being displayed when you click Show hidden devices.

If you are a developer or power user and you want to be able to view devices that are not connected to your computer, set this environment variable globally:

1. Right-click My Computer.
2. Click Properties.
3. Click the Advanced tab.
4. Click on the Environment Variables tab.
5. Set the variables in the System Variables box.

NOTE: Use this method only for troubleshooting or development purposes, or to prevent users from accidentally uninstalling a required device that is not connected to the computer (such as a USB device or docking station that is not connected to a laptop computer).

Reference: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315539