though, this really doesn't help those with the MySQL problems.
it has been almost a month and there does not appear to be any progress - if you will pardon my ignorance of your procedures. usually the mantra is 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. it almost seems that the staff here are quite averse to this philosophy.
also - have you guys looked into/are you using/have you heard of clustered storage? it might help you out. not to mention RAID to guard against drive failures

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just my $0.02