Hello,
> I don't know if anyone brought this up, and I hate to state the

quoted text
> obvious, but if you're getting bad blocks then the hard drive has

> exhausted its ability to deal with them on its own and should be

> replaced.  Otherwise you'll see data loss/corruption and a higher

> probability of a total drive failure.

not always, bad sectors get only reasigned if either the sector

containing data can still be read after a few tries eg. the drive

notices when reading that this part is going bad or when you write

to the sector. in case you stumble upon a bad sector and just try

to read it, nothing will happen. write it and it will get reasigned.
with the current drive-capacities and data densities bad sectors are

kind of "unavoidable" in consumer grade drives. that's why it is

recommended to read scan your raid of cheap drives often, so the

drives have a chance to discover sectors going bad when they are

still readable.
currently we just take drives with some bad sectors out of the raid,

write check them, see if they are gone, mark them and use them again.

if it happens again after that they go out for warranty. of course

not for really important data, there it's SAS or fresh drives. ;)
-sm