I don't know if this will help, but maybe you could look into a diff. forum software and just archive this current one. So all these old posts will be searchable but all new stuff would go into a diff. database?

The forum software we use is good as it is. Any reason for suggesting a new forum software?

Yeah, since the site seems to go down a lot more than other forums I frequent (even though there's more people on those) it seems as though something's not quite right for the current load. It's possible that the way the software's written, the DB calls are creating bottlenecks and other problems that crash/corrupt the database. Perhaps the locking scopes are too broad and causing more load than necessary? And/or there could be corrupted data since actions aren't all atomic? Just guessing so I could be completely off.

That are hardware problems which have already been addressed. The new servers are set to handle the forum easily just the issue today was a failure of 2 drives which unforuantely even after all the measure we put in place caused the site to fail.

The software isn't the issue, as I'm a member of numerous other boards that use the same exact software, and they have no issues. It has to be the a hardware issue, or a database issue, which HostGeekZ explained.