I've been having no end of issues with a 3ware 9650SE-24M8 in a server that's coming on a year old. I've got 24 WDC WD5001ABYS drives (500GB) hooked to it, running as a single RAID6 w/ a hot spare. These issues boil down to the card periodically throwing errors like the following:
sd 1:0:0:0: WARNING: (0x06:0x002C): Command (0x8a) timed out, resetting card.
Usually when this happens, it's followed by:
3w-9xxx: scsi1: AEN: INFO (0x04:0x005E): Cache synchronization completed:unit=0.
On the less pleasant occasions, it's followed by:
scsi1: ERROR: (0x06:0x0036): Response queue (large) empty failed during reset sequence. 3w-9xxx: scsi1: ERROR: (0x06:0x002B): Controller reset failed during scsi host reset. sd 1:0:0:0: scsi: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery
This of course leads to a several hour downtime as the system has to be powered down (not just rebooted) and then the volume needs to be fscked. I've been back and forth with both the vendor and (via the vendor) 3ware with this. The card has been replaced, as well as the whole system. I'm running the latest firmware and drivers from 3ware.
Have other folks had good luck with this card? What sorts of configs are you running? I'm in the position of needing more storage, and I'm a bit gun shy on 3ware at the moment...