A system administrator is investigating reports of significantly degraded performance on a file server that uses a hardware RAID 5 array. Users are reporting slow file access, and initial diagnostics with OS-level performance monitoring tools indicate a storage subsystem bottleneck with high I/O latency. Which of the following is the BEST next step for the administrator to take to diagnose the problem?
Use diskpart to verify the partition alignment.
Defragment the hard drives in the array.
Check the RAID controller's management utility for array status and errors.
Run a chkdsk or fsck command on the affected volume.
The correct action is to use the RAID controller's management utility. Since the operating system's performance monitoring tools have already isolated the bottleneck to the storage subsystem, the next logical step in the troubleshooting methodology is to examine the health and status of the hardware components directly. The RAID controller's utility provides detailed information about the state of the array (e.g., degraded, rebuilding), the individual drives, the controller cache, and the cache battery, which are common points of failure that cause severe performance degradation.
Running a filesystem check utility like chkdsk or fsck would be premature. These tools are used to check for and repair filesystem corruption, not to diagnose the underlying hardware performance issues. It is best practice to first confirm the health of the hardware array before addressing potential filesystem issues.
Defragmenting the volume is a file-level optimization and is unlikely to resolve a significant, sudden performance drop, which is more indicative of a hardware fault. Furthermore, its effectiveness on modern RAID arrays is debatable and it is not a primary diagnostic tool.
Using diskpart to check partition alignment addresses a specific configuration issue that can impact performance. However, this is a static setting that is unlikely to have changed and caused a recent, drastic performance degradation. Diagnosing the real-time status of the array for faults is a more probable path to discovering the root cause.
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Why is it better to check the RAID array first rather than running `chkdsk` or `fsck`?