[beh9540]

This reminds me a lot of work I used to do in the controls world. We had a large amount of equipment all with proprietary networking to embedded systems that were basically Intel 386 systems running DOS. The big issue we had was they had spinning hard drives in them, which would fail, and replacing them meant we needed to replace all the nodes on the network, often hundreds of pieces of equipment. To make matters worse, the company was long out of business.

My boss came up with the idea of replacing the drives with industrial flash drives, so as the drives failed we replaced them. We had some issues getting drives that were small enough, as there was an issue with the BIOS and drives that were too big, but we were able to keep the systems running so we could eventually replace the whole networks while equipment was getting upgraded.

We had an even older system that was an entirely custom mainframe computer with 10" hard drives and modem banks that we all stayed far away from. It wasn't as critical, so it was even slower on replacement.