Firmware upgrade help needed - (Hard Drive)

I have a server running Windows 2012. It has 12  3TB Sata II drives running in RAID 6. I am trying to update them to the latest frimware, but running into some issues.

Last week I had 2 drives that had some issues, so I was sent replacement drives. I took each drive offline (one at a time), removed the drive, inserted the new drive, it rebuilt and everything went great. These 2 new drives had a newer firmware on them, so I want to update the other drives to the newer firmware as well.

Because I can't afford to take the server down (it is a backup server doing incremental backups every 15 min), I decided to follow a similar procedure to the drive replacements I had previously done. So, I proceeded to take one of drives offline, removed the drive, connected it to a PC, and ran the firmware update successfully. I put the drive back in the server, it recognized it and started the rebuild process. After about an hour the server froze up and I had to power cycle it. It came back up and thankfully everything was ok and the updated drive was working fine.

I thought the freezing up of the server on the first update may have been a fluke, so I tried it again using the same procedure, but I got the same results. The server froze up after about an hour of rebuilding.

So here I am, looking for some help.

I am wondering if the fact that the replacement drives I but in were fresh/blank drives vs the ones I updated had data on them, have anything to do with the problem?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks,

Brandon