A systems administrator receives a critical monitoring alert indicating that a enterprise server's hardware RAID 5 array, consisting of four 2TB NVMe SSDs, is currently operating in a degraded state. The controller log confirms that Drive 2 has suffered a total hardware failure and is offline, while Drives 0, 1, and 3 remain online and healthy. To ensure continuous data availability and restore full fault tolerance with minimal downtime, which of the following is the most appropriate immediate action the administrator should take?
- Hot-swap the failed disk with a new, matching capacity drive and initiate an array rebuild through the RAID management utility.Answer
- BBreak the degraded array, format all remaining healthy drives, and restore the complete storage volume from the latest system backup.
- CRe-initialize Drive 2 in the host operating system's disk management manager and assign it as a dynamic global hot spare.
- DConvert the existing configuration to a RAID 0 striped set across the three functional drives to maximize read/write performance during recovery.
Answer
Perform a hot-swap replacement of the failed drive with a new drive of matching or greater capacity and initiate an array rebuild.
In a RAID 5 setup, data parity is distributed across all member drives. When one drive fails, the volume enters a degraded state but remains operational because missing data is recalculated on-the-fly using parity from the surviving drives. The correct troubleshooting procedure is to replace the failed drive and rebuild the array, restoring full redundancy without taking the system offline or resorting to data restoration from backups.
Step-by-Step Solution
Key Concept
Degraded RAID 5 array recovery and hot-swapping procedures
Estimated Time:2m 0s