I had an installation at SHAPE in 1992. The Sun servers were dual connected to IPI drives. Fast fail-over. About 3 weeks after install, drives started crashing. I sent a list of serial numbers to Sun in Germany. ALL of the drives came from a lot with defective filters and HDA connectors that were not properly affixed. I had to work with a couple RAF techs to fully disassemble all of the drives. The circuit boards and platters went into a vat of acid. Only the housings with the serial numbers were saved to ship back to Seagate via Sun. We indeed found missing filters and loose connectors between the HDA ribbon and circuit board. Once replaced, the system ran as designed. It was a first class pain in the butt.
I didn’t have h/w exposure to SUN until the mid-90s cross-compiling on SPARC workstation. Years later, had access to SUN servers, but they were eventually e-wasted due to lack of use. The adoption of XEN hypervisors effectively obsoleted the older server platforms and changed how the compute infrastructure was capitalized. I certainly don’t miss having to resurrect h/w components — knock on wood... lol