I've also had lockups and panics and such, but, as I said, I was
running kernels that were more-or-less known to have problems with
fast SCSI subsystems (or so I had gathered from these mailing lists),
so I figured I'd not clutter things up and just wait for the probems,
which seemed fairly well understood, to be resolved.
Data corruption is relatively infrequent and usually indicates a problem with
the underlying hardware, rather than the operating system. This is especially
true if Linux 1.2.13 will run reliably on your system. The usual causes of
data corruption are memory or external cache problems, either due to timing
parameters that are set too aggressive, or just plain faulty memory/cache, or
due to PCI optimizations being turned on that do not work properly in the
particular chipset revision you have.
Leonard