regular fsck runs are too disturbing - and current approach does not work very well in detecting defects!

[Phillip Susi]

Jan Claeys wrote:
> I'm not an Ubuntu developer, but if 'badblocks' looks for hardware
> defects, it's mostly useless on most hard disks in use these days.  The
> HDD firmware does internal bad block detection & replacement (using
> spare blocks on the disk reserved for that purpose).  So if you can
> detect any bad blocks using a software check, it means that your hard
> disk is almost dead and should be replace ASAP (like, rather today than
> tomorrow).

It can only remap the block on a write, not a read, but yea, 
smartmontools is a better method to monitor for defects.