* SuperMicro S2DGU motherboard with two 550MHz processors.
* Promise or SIIG Ultra66 PCI IDE controller card (both of them exhibit this
problem).

The 7.2 SMP kernel rapidly trashes any UDMA hard drive plugged into one of the
controllers listed above when I start doing intensive I/O on it.  You can see
the details by searching for "Kamens" in fa.linux.kernel on groups.google.com.

The 7.2 UP kernel also sometimes trashes a hard drive, but less frequently.

The 2.4.18-pre3-ac2 kernel does not have this problem.  It is possible that some
version of Andre Hedrick's IDE patches for 2.4.x before 2.4.18-pre3-ac2 also
solved this problem -- I didn't try any patches before 2.4.18-pre3-ac2.  I did,
however, try stock 2.4.x kernels through 2.4.16, and they all exhibited this
problem.

I think a kernel update for 7.2 may be in order.