Best week in a long time: replaced 12 dying drives in a server rack in 3 days without a single callback

Had a week last November where everything just clicked. Walked into a client's office downtown and their RAID 5 was throwing errors on three disks at once. Ordered replacements from CDW, got them overnight, and swapped all 12 over three days during off hours. Not one drive failed during rebuild, no corrupted data, and the client even bought me lunch at a steakhouse downtown. Has anyone else had a week where a big job actually went smooth without any surprise problems?

2 comments

2 Comments

davidwright20d agoMost Upvoted

Read a piece on ServerTheHome last year about someone who had a similar RAID 5 nightmare turn into a smooth swap, which is super rare in this business. Three days of physical work with no callbacks feels like winning the lottery, especially with old hardware that's already past its expected life. That steakhouse lunch was probably the best part, since clients almost never show gratitude for the boring work that keeps their data safe.

miles79819d ago

Three days of physical work and no callbacks is basically a miracle in this field. I still remember swapping out a RAID 6 array on a Friday night and spent the whole weekend convinced I was gonna get a panicked call at 3 AM about a rebuild failure. Instead the client sent me a gift card to a local pizza joint, which was nice but I kept checking my phone every five minutes like a paranoid dad waiting for his teenager to come home. Must have been the universe balancing out all the other times I've spent a week elbow deep in a server rack crying over a single failed disk.