Dell Cyberdyne Servers (weirdness with old hardware)

[TheFeniX]

So, our office had an old Dell Poweredge 830 that I replaced more than a few years ago. The boss didn't want anything done with the 830, he wanted to toss it out, so I swiped it and was using it for quite a while as a general gaming/teamspeak server. After a few years, it would start locking up. It got to the point, I broke the software mirror, thinking it was bad HDDs as the problem was multiple bad clusters/files. I would clean them up, and I'd have loads more in a few days. The Event Viewer was filled with failed R/W errors and other nonsense such as failed write-caching/etc.

Then it got to the point where both drives, no matter which I was using, would end up with corrupted MBRs and other nonsense. The idea that both were failing in the exact same way in the exact same timeframe didn't make sense. So, I finally got around to testing other hardware. Dell's diagnostics finally showed me (after multiple clean runs) that the backplane was failing. It finally got to the point where it wouldn't recognize anything plugged into the backplane and I was getting hardware faults and the BIOS would randomly not recognize the backplane itself.

I figured at some point I'd just disable the backplane and use the onboard SATA for HDDs because that's all I needed it for. A year or so passed while we were homeless and the thing collected dust in the office. I finally got around to working on it and I figured I'd boot it up to try and "cheat" having to reinstall by deleting most of the hardware out of the device manger before I reconnected the HDDs to the onboard SATA.

So, I booted it up and forgot about it because something came up with the Wife. I left it running for like 3 days and finally got around to messing with it... then realised it had been running for 3 days without any errors. So, I just left it running... for a month. No errors, no black screens. It's now run Killing Floor servers again, teamspeak, Terraria, you name it. No problems. No errors: I haven't touched anything on it hardware-wise since plugging it back in. It's been like... what March, so 6 months now?

The only thing that has changed is the location and the UPS it's hooked up to. Bad power?

I'm not complaining in the least, but "dafuq?"