Now this sounds exactly what I've been suffering from. Using Thinkpad T60 with a SAMSUNG MMCRE64G5MXP-0VB SSD disk. Music playing, video editing, web browsing etc was smooth while kernel compilation was in background until link time comes and whole machine freezes for minutes. Sometimes music continued to play but even keyboard leds where not reacting to caps or numlock presses. But after a few minutes it's over with nothing in the logs indicating a problem.
Lately I tried to get rid of the problem with ext4 options like noatime, data=writeback etc which did speed the system up a bit but did not remove
the lockups completely. Hope this really gets resolved.