PE 1650 with Perc 3/Di

I have a Poweredge 1650 with the Perc 3/Di raid controller, and have not
been able to keep it up an running for more than a week or so at a
time.  The mainboard was recently replaced on a pre-emptive basis for an
unrelated problem, but the problem existed before the replacement as
well.  After replacement, I updated all bios and esm firmware files that
were available on dell's website.

I was running a 2.4.22 kernel with the stock aacraid driver and it would
crash about every 8-12 days with errors like this:

Feb 29 18:43:55 phoenix kernel: aacraid:        NMI ISR:
NMI_SECONDARY_ATU_ERROR
Feb 29 18:47:13 phoenix kernel: scsi: device set offline - command error
recover failed: host 0 channel 0 id 0 lun 0
Feb 29 18:47:13 phoenix kernel: SCSI disk error : host 0 channel 0 id 0
lun 0 return code = 6000000
Feb 29 18:47:13 phoenix kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:04, sector 15466552
Feb 29 18:47:13 phoenix kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:02, sector 3211272

Based on info on this list, I moved to a 2.4.25 kernel but kept the
2.4.22 aacraid driver.  It crashed the same way.

I have since got the latest (1.1.5) version of the driver from Adaptec's
site and it crashed in less than 48 hours with different errors, but I
could not grab them as it locked up harder than usual.

The errors flooding the console were about scsi hang? and scsi bus not
responding.

The really strange part of this is that I can't reproduce the problem,
it just happens randomly.  If I run bonnie++ for a couple hours with a
few gigs of I/O it chugs right along, but then it'll be sitting there
doing nothing the next day and just stop responding.  I just can't find
the trigger for the failure.

Is there any way to run linux with this hardware?  Is there some way to
bypass this hardware and run a software raid, or would I have to buy a
new scsi controller?  With the disk backplane the way it is in the
server, would I even be able to put a new controller in there?

Any suggestions or pointers are appreciated.

Matt

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