problems with samba and Perc/2 RAID

[John (Shiro)]

Hi,

	We recently acquired a Dell PowerEdge 4300 with two PIII 500
Xeons and half a gig of RAM, running RedHat 6.1 out of the box.  In
addition, it has a PERC2/SC Single Channel RAID card for six 18GB LVD
SCSI drives.
	The problem is that, while we're not doing anything fancy with
samba, basic file share stuff, the load seems to spike whenever writes
are done.  When doing a large file copy, the load will steadily rise to
about 7 or 8, and then the share stops responding, killing any file
copy taking place.
	It's not the RAID that's causing the problem per se; when I do
a large file copy on the server, the copy works just fine without a
load spike taking place.
 	Has anyone else had this problem before?
	Also, sometimes shares tend to disappear without warning.  For
instance, the /home share will be working fine, and then suddenly
disappear from Windows client access without warning.  Restarting smb
and nmb seems to clear the problem, but it happens again eventually.

	I apologize if this is the wrong place to post this; I'm a
linux / samba newbie, but can't find any reference to this problem on
the web.

Thanks,

John