CompTIA Server+ SK0-005 Practice Question

The most probable cause is a loose power or data connector on the drive backplane. The recent physical maintenance involving cable rerouting makes a physical connectivity issue highly likely. Since all drives, which are connected via the backplane, went offline simultaneously and their activity lights are off, it points to a common failure point that provides both power and data connectivity to the entire set of drives. Reseating the backplane's main power and data (SAS/SATA) cables is the correct first step in troubleshooting.

• A RAID controller cache battery failure typically results in the write cache being disabled, leading to significant performance degradation, but it does not usually cause the entire array to go offline. The drives would still be detected by the controller.
• A simultaneous failure of multiple physical drives is statistically very improbable. Following troubleshooting methodology, a common point of failure should be investigated before assuming multiple independent failures.
• An OS patch failure would manifest after the hardware initialization phase. Since the issue is reported by the RAID controller's firmware before the operating system boots, an OS-level problem is not the root cause.