Well, in my sysadmin days we would have test/staging equipment that we'd make sure we knew what would happen when a change was made. But I don't know the detai

Well, in my sysadmin days we would have test/staging equipment that we'd make sure we knew what would happen when a change was made. But I don't know the details of what really happened, so I can't make a judgement really. If I could edit my previous comment I would, to be less emphatic that someone did something "wrong". It could have been that this particular disk array had different firmware or was faulty. All we know is that something unexpected happened.