During a quarterly health check on a 4-bay RAID 5 NAS, you notice that the activity LED for bay 3 is flashing green while its separate status LED is flashing amber. The other drives show solid green status LEDs. No SMART errors have yet been logged in the OS. Which action should you take next to minimize the risk of data loss?
Reseat the SATA cable and clear the controller's error counter.
Disable write caching on the NAS and continue normal operation.
Power down the NAS and perform a full RAID reinitialization.
Hot-swap bay 3 with a new, identical drive and allow the array to rebuild.
A flashing amber status LED typically means the RAID controller has marked the disk as predictive-failure or degraded while it is still online. Because the disk can drop out of the array at any time, the safest course is to replace it proactively and let the controller rebuild the RAID set on a healthy drive. Simply reseating cables or disabling write caching does not address the impending hardware failure, and reinitializing the array would erase all data and is unnecessary when only one drive is suspect in a RAID 5 set.
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What is RAID 5, and why is it resilient to drive failures?
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What does the RAID rebuilding process involve after a drive is replaced?