If it comes down to it and my sda drive is failing on a production server, what is the best time of day to put in a request for a hard drive replaceent and OS reload (with the same partitions as the existing?)

Are there more staff to do this type of work during the daytime?

Or is it better to request it at night when there may be less activity (and traffic to the server)

Is there a priority option available?

What timeframe am I looking at?

I would say early afternoon. It gives you the morning to verify backups and the afternoon to recover, or deal with an underlying hardware problem discovered during the reload.

Thanks Aaron.

Well the best laid plans -- after running the offline disk diagnostics from 2-7 with the result that the disk is in fact failing the server came back online for 16 minutes and then dropped offline again... I presume that's a sign the drive is on its very last legs so I put in a hard drive replacement ticket and os reload ticket as of 7:45 a.m.

IMPO Jeff (and from personal experience 3 times), It doesn't matter when you order it...it will still take up to 72 hours to get it done.

PM me a ticket number, I'll check it out.

Started hardware replacement and reload near 8:00 a.m.

At noon server came back online, but the wrong size drive (a 36.7 gb drive) had been installed as sda instead of the original and required 73 GB drive.

So now a whole new reload has to happen.

Production server has now been offline for 12+ hours. This has been my only bad experience with the planet in the last 2 1/2 years, and has been bad. The techs have been friendly and have tried to be helpful, but I'm exasperated and frustrated by this experience.

The Planet has all atleast a few hundred of the same servers, so why dont they keep drives preloaded like we do? Its understandable if theres a raid array and it has to be rebuilt but if its just a single drive configuration....


I'd say about 2PM, that way by the time it gets started it will be off peak hours.

I asked for custom partitioning, but the problem is the delay in communications, the long time it takes to diagnose a drive with the server required to be offline, the fact that admin time to help diagnose a hardware problem was at first said to only be available during business hours and not 24/7, the fact that my drac console also went down, and in this case the main problem I have is that I can't understand how the wrong drive was inserted and wasted 4 hours for absolutely nothing. This has been frustrating.

This is my only bad experience with the planet in the last 2 1/2 years, so this is not a 'bash the planet thread'.

The Planet is bashed enough, no since in wasting torpedos on a sinking ship.

It couldve been worse, much worse. Be thankful you caught it in time and it wasnt a surprise thing.