I want to know if I have badblocks on my sdb5 HDD.

[Derek Broughton]

Frederic Schaer wrote:

> I'm coming after the battle, but if smart reports there are bad blocks
> (using the previous given smartctl -a /dev/sdXX command), given the
> price of hard drives and given the price of your own data integrity
> (your data has no price, does it ?), I would directly go buy a new
> disk...

I'm coming back even later, having been gone for a week, and I don't 
know smartctl, but it was my understanding that drives practically 
_always_ have bad blocks.  But there are blocks that are bad because 
it's too expensive to make every disk perfect in the manufacturing 
process, and there are blocks that are bad because the hardware is 
failing (either the medium, or the head mechanisms).  Basically, if you 
can tell that the bad block count is increasing at an accelerating rate, 
you have imminent hardware failure.
-- 
derek