To give another, (but older), example of mass disk change out, here is one from around 2002.
The company I worked for, had a pile of equipment on pallets that was for an outside project. It fell through, (probably due to the .COM bust). So after more than a year, maybe 2, they decided to use it themselves, (it could not be returned). The equipment was lower end Sun Microsystems servers and disk arrays, perfectly fine for misc. use.
After installation we started getting disk failures. Their was perhaps 10 disk arrays, each populated with only 4 disks, (plus 2 OS disks per 10 servers). All the failures were from one brand, a certain 3 letter company that is not Toshiba, Seagate, WD or Hitachi. Any way, poor Sun Microsystems was stuck having to replace the ones from that vendor. They ranted that they wanted to do it one by one, which we said would take forever. (To be fair to Sun Microsystems, they probably did not have that many disks in the local support depot...)
When the 15 or 20 replacement disks arrived, we had a disk change party week. Found that some of the disk arrays had 2 of the "bad" drives, which in a RAID-5 meant 1 disk replacement at a time. And one of my co-workers failed to perform the disk array firmware update, so it's re-sync was snail slow, taking all day. (The re-sync normally took about 4 hours.)
All in all, an annoying time.
What I learned:
- Engage vendor early
- Keep records
- Insist that you get the service you are entitled to
- Get the service in a timely manor
- Remind them that it's not my side's fault, nor the person I am speaking to
- Be polite, but firm