A systems administrator is performing a routine visual inspection of servers in a data center. The administrator notices that on one of the servers, a single hot-swappable drive bay has a solid amber status light, while the other drives in the same array show a solid green light. What does the solid amber light MOST likely indicate?
The drive is functioning normally in an idle state.
The drive has a fault or is in a pre-failure state.
The drive is being rebuilt as part of a RAID array.
The correct answer is that the drive has a fault or is in a pre-failure state. A solid amber or orange LED is a standard visual indicator used by most server hardware manufacturers to signal that a hard drive has failed, is experiencing a fault, or has been flagged by a predictive failure analysis system like S.M.A.R.T. A blinking green light, not a solid amber one, typically indicates drive activity, such as a RAID rebuild. A solid green light indicates the drive is online and functioning normally. An unconfigured drive might be indicated by the light being off or another color combination, but a solid amber light is consistently used for fault conditions.
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What is the purpose of S.M.A.R.T. in hard drives?
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