A blade server indicates it has a failed hard disk in Slot 0. This is the third instance of Slot 0 disk failure in three months. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause of the failed hard…

A faulty host bus adapter would degrade or disable storage connectivity across all slots or all drives in the array, not cause isolated repeated failures in one specific slot.

The backplane is the mid-plane circuit board in a blade server that provides the physical and electrical interface between drive slots and the storage bus. When multiple replacement drives fail consecutively in the same slot, the common factor is the backplane connector for that slot. A damaged or corroded backplane slot causes each newly installed drive to fail, making it the most probable root cause.

A network interface card manages Ethernet or Fibre Channel network traffic and has no involvement in local disk slot operations or drive failures.

The CPU handles compute operations globally and does not interact with individual disk slots in a way that would cause repeated, slot-specific hard disk failures.