How do I use external PERC RAID 3DC as regular SCSI controller?

The card versions of PERC controllers (as opposed to the raid-on-motherboard option) can only be raid controllers, and not a scsi controller. The ROMB controllers can be changed from one to the other in the server bios usually (or by removing the ROMB key, dimm, etc).

How do I let the adapter see the drives separately as physical instead of logical during the "bootup" -AND- if the adapter found the drive fails, it'll post message on the screen about predictive failure?

To make them look like individual drives, make each drive it's own single-disk raid 0.

As for the SMART messaging question, I don't know about that, maybe someone else does.