Complete Hard Drive Replacements over 4 days - Gemini, Leo, Cancer, VPS1

[NexDog]

We two major issues with the hard drives on our new generation Raid 10 servers that we will start fixing tonight. We have been using Western Digital Green Drives and we have discovered that they (a) spin slower in Raid 10 arrays and (b) Raid is causing them to degrade REALLY fast. "Green drives" basically are supposed to be more environmentally conscious and essentially spin at a lower RPM rate when they're not being engaged. The problem is that in a RAID setup, the drives need to run full RPM, and thus the lowered RPM speeds, causing degrading of the array, thus the failed drives. We are replacing the drives with Western Digital Caviar Black Drives which are specifically engineered for RAID setups. Our Raid 10 arrays are 4 x 500gb drives so what we will do is take the server offline, replace one drive, rebuild the array and repeat this a further 3 times until all drives are replaced. So between 3am and 5am tonight and continuing till the 15th Gemini, Leo, Cancer, VPS1 will experience around 10-15 minutes downtime as the drives are replaced.

[susannad]

Do we have an expected date for completion?

I developed a problem with a site on Gemini in the last 24 hours and feel that I shouldn't contact support until these replacements are done and dusted

[NexDog]

We ran out of drives.

As it stands Gemini, Cancer, VPS1 have one drive left to change. Leo has two. Feel free to bug tech support as all the heavy lifting is being done by the hardware guys at the DC.