Pure Storage FlashArray-Storage-Professional Exam - Topic 4 Question 6 Discussion

Logical vs. Physical Reclamation: When an administrator 'Eradicates' a volume, the FlashArray immediately removes the logical reference to that data. However, the physical blocks are not 'wiped' instantly. Instead, those blocks are marked as 'eligible for reclamation' by Purity's background Garbage Collection (GC) process.

Workload Prioritization: Purity is designed to prioritize Host I/O (production performance) over background system tasks. If the array is under an extremely high workload (high Load Meter percentage), Purity will automatically throttle the Garbage Collection process to ensure the application latency remains as low as possible.

The 'Reclamation Lag': If the incoming write rate from the hosts (new data being written) exceeds the speed at which the throttled GC process can reclaim space from the eradicated volume, the 'Used Space' metric will continue to trend upward. This is a common scenario when arrays are pushed to their performance or capacity limits simultaneously.

Why Option A is incorrect: The 24-hour safeguard applies to Destroyed volumes (the 'Pending Eradication' bucket). Once an administrator manually clicks Eradicate, that safeguard is bypassed, and the space should logically be freed. If the space is still not reflecting as 'Free,' it is a back-end processing delay, not a timer delay.

Why Option C is incorrect: In the Purity Operating Environment, the array does not require the host to 'unmount' or 'disconnect' before it can reclaim space. Once the volume is destroyed and eradicated on the array side, those blocks are gone from the array's perspective, regardless of the host's state (though the host will likely experience I/O errors).