Yes. Our availability target is not high. Our priorities while designing this system were 1. Data durability - need to make sure scientific data is never lost,

Yes. Our availability target is not high. Our priorities while designing this system were 1. Data durability - need to make sure scientific data is never lost, 2. cost - our budget is small, and we build what we can afford, 3. performance - extract most value out of the hardware we use, 4. Availability - maximise availability by virtue of having fewer things that can fail. However, fancy failover systems and distributed filesystems may be out of reach(at least for now). So, we make do with what we have. We have three similar storage configs(and three mirrors as slow backups). We carry spare memory sticks, Optane drives, disks, and power supply for minimising down time due to hardware failures. If something were to go wrong for which we don't have spares, yes, the storage will be offline until we can fix it. Planned updates? - we have two scheduled downtimes in a year. All patches to these machines happen at that time. These machines are strictly internal and don't have internet access except for those planned maintenance days.