Is the White Giant server down?

I only have stuff on WG, and when I log into it, it gives me a time out message instead of a country or enterprise. That said, the Home page works, these forums work, and when I click on other worlds their stuff comes up as normal. This is true both on phone and web.

Update: It seems to be working fine for me now.

There was a drive failure in the white giant server. While we are able to hotswap a new disk without having to suffer downtime, we decided to upgrade the redundancy while we were there.

Are the servers on Solid State Disks? I hope so and I'll explain why. I've been using SSDs for a few years now. I picked up a Samsung SSD on Newegg back in 2012 and have had no issues. It does read and write at over 500 MegaByte/second. If I remember right I think its specifically 530somethin MegaByte/second.

I noticed using SSD rather than HDD is definitely a huge noticeable difference than conventional HDD. If I remember right, HDD is much less than 100 MB/second, like around 45-75 MegaBytes/second? I think my SSD is approximately 15x faster than a fast HDD. Bandwidth is one thing but I also noticed responsiveness has been drastically increased since switching from HDD to SSD. What's most important to me however is reliability. With no moving parts (as well no friction and less heat), I expect my SSD to last a really long time. I highly recommend all servers transition to Solid State Disks, and you can listen to me because I&#

Depending on how the server's file operations work, this may be a mistake. When I looked into this a few years ago, most SSDs could only handle about 10,000 writes to a particular sector before the hard drive lost its ability to store data properly, and with a server that number can ratchet up pretty quickly. If they're bottlenecking on HDD I/O operations it might make sense, but it's not a slam-dunk.

Also, W3C isn't exactly made of money. If the choice is between dropping a few grand on slightly better hard drives(since they'll need multiples for each of five world servers, so at least 10 total) or dropping it on dev time to get the game working better, I suspect they'd do better to invest in the devs.

Yeah I think you were right on all points, I've read the same in the past, yet they've made improvements to SSD in the last few years and I think they've resolved that issue, as well they're a lot more affordable now. I could be wrong but I think they're presently much better than HDD in all points now however still a more expensive component than a HDD. Going by those points you mentioned regardless, data that is only read a lot at least like default images, could be stored on SSDs and potentially increase overall responsiveness of the game.

I love geeking out on this stuff!
The last simcountry server was switched to SSD's more than a year ago. This was the first drive failure we've had since the switch to SSD's

In case you're curious; all servers run samsung 840/850 Pro drives in RAID1. The increased redundancy I mentioned above is thanks to the addition of hot spares.
Backups are run very frequently, to an offsite location.
To round it all off. Big static data like for example images are stored on a cloud (distributed to many servers across the globe) to improve page load times.

Simcountry was, in the past, always limited by HDD performance and switching to SSDs allowed us to reduce the physical number of servers. The up front investment pales in comparison to the money saved on needing less hardware and using significantly less power.

P.S. 15000 RPM HDD's are not cheap and break all the time :P

That's interesting, I am surprised to see Simcountry is using such good hardware. I'm using a Samsung 830 here, so I know those are excellent disks.