Vault Maintenance January 23

People inevitably ask two questions when Vimm's Lair has maintenance.

1. Why is it down?
2. When will it be back?

For an experiment, here's a breakdown of the work planned for Monday morning.

• Replace a 6-drive bay with an 8-drive bay.
• Install two new disks.
  
  • For the Xbox 360 Vault. Current disks are nearly full.
• Convert the Xbox 360 Vault from a 2-disk RAID0 to a 4-disk RAID5.
  
  • From what I've read this should be supported...
• Upgrade the network card firmware.
• Move the network card to the x16 CPU slot and the SAS card to the x4 PCH slot (swap them).
  
  • The network card uses a 20Gb bond but it's maxing out around 14Gbps. Perhaps using the CPU PCIe slot will fix the bottleneck?

An outage notice will be posted in the affected Vaults Sunday morning. It should start around 11:00am Monday and end when I'm done. Once the server's online the Xbox 360 Vault will remain closed for a couple hours to finish the RAID conversion. Just to be safe a backup's being made now, so worst-case the RAID5 will be built from the backup.