Examkin

Question

Difficulty: MediumStorage Drives and RAID Array Issues

A system administrator receives an automated alert indicating that a database server running a hardware RAID 5 array composed of four SATA SSDs has entered a degraded state due to a single drive failure. All application services and data remain accessible. What is the most appropriate immediate action the administrator should take to restore fault tolerance to the array?

  1. Hot-swap the failed drive with a new SSD of equal or greater capacity to begin the array rebuild process.Answer
  2. B
    Delete the current RAID 5 configuration and reconfigure the remaining three drives into a RAID 0 array.
  3. C
    Format all active drives in the array immediately to clear corrupted parity block metadata.
  4. D
    Replace the SATA SSDs with M.2 NVMe drives without verifying motherboard socket or controller protocol support.

Answer

Hot-swap the failed drive with a new SSD of equal or greater capacity to begin the array rebuild process.
In a RAID 5 array, data and parity are striped across all member drives, allowing the volume to maintain operation when a single disk fails. Replacing the faulty drive with a functional disk of equal or greater capacity allows the hardware RAID controller to recalculate lost parity blocks and restore full array fault tolerance without data loss.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the current operational state of the degraded RAID 5 array.
The array is degraded due to one failed drive out of four, but data remains accessible via parity calculation across the surviving disks.
RAID 5 provides single-drive fault tolerance by distributing parity data across all member drives.
2
Select the correct drive replacement procedure.
Obtain a healthy replacement drive that meets or exceeds the storage capacity of the original failed drive.
The RAID controller requires sufficient capacity on the new disk to recalculate and write missing data and parity blocks.
3
Perform drive replacement and monitor array rebuild.
Inserting the replacement drive prompts the hardware RAID controller to rebuild array redundancy in the background while keeping data online.
Hot-swapping and rebuilding restores fault tolerance without destroying the volume or requiring downtime.

Key Concept

Degraded RAID 5 Array Recovery and Drive Replacement
Rate this question

Topics

Storage Drives and RAID Array Issues

More questions from this topic