Congrats on your new Hive witness journey.

this runs on 3.5" spinning disks

It's bold, but viable. The problem is that it takes ages when you have to do a replay. But after that, it works.

HHD: 28 TB in various RAID configurations (60 TB of actual Hard Drives in total)

With that amount of available storage, it would be fun to try to spin up an API node since the main obstacle is often disk space. I'd be curious to see how this performs based on memory and cache allocation. That's where it might get stuck. Also, be prepared for several weeks of replay! 😅

So because of that I went with Hive 1.27.10. Was this a mistake?

No, we have several (top) witnesses, including me, running that version. You can check it here.

Most of the guides I have seen are geared around 1.27.8 and honestly I should have gone with that version # because I think I wouldn't have run into as many problems if I had.

I'm not sure. Depending on your Ubuntu version, it could have been even worse.

Looking forward to your contribution to the community.

PS1: Use https://vote.hive.uno/@witness4all to campaign for votes, I find it way more user-friendly than Hivesigner.
PS2: Thank you for the mention and kind words.
PS3: Arc(h)ange(ls) are asexuals. That being said, I use to appear as a man when going public 😇