They didn't mention RAID, and they talk about using SSDs. The failure mode you describe (timeouts) is one typical for spinning rust drives, and not for SSDs.
They then asked the provider to swap the disk. They had a RAID1; it's a common enough setup.
SSDs fail in many of the the same ways as spinning disks, they just add a few more failure cases.
Feeding 15 or so volts out the 12 volt line usually has negative results after a couple hours
I went thru something like this circa 1996. It was not fun at all.
Sometime similar happened with some networking gear at a previous employer. "I know we have pri/sec control cpu boards, but they're burning out as fast as I can swap a new one in!"