I have a few machines with the same behavior. The boxes run fine unless you tax them with things like unpacking ports, du on a large tree or dd'ng some /dev/zero to disk. The 1950 can route 400mbit ethernet with no problems for weeks if you don't mess with the disks, so i guess the hardware is reasonably unbroken.
Broken hardware or some driver/chipset issue? Dell 1950 with a PERC5 raid1 SATA 160gb mirror. 4.2-RELEASE A 300mb dd write makes an unkillable process. Outputs a few "sd0: not queued, error 5" lines. Recently flashed the card to the latest firmware. Behaves somewhat better. Happens with a single drive too. Needs rebooting to be able to write to the drive after it has started to behave. Takes forever to unpack ports.tar.gz, i aborted the unpacking after 20 minutes and about 100mb unpacked. Is at least stable, doesn't die, just writes to the disk really slow. Like previous poster, unkillable processes and weird behaviour. Needs rebooting to be able to write to the drive after it has started to behave. ----- Dell 1750 scsi Our two 1750 scsi boxes works good though. Doesn't seem to crash from dd. -----
