What is going on here....

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 24 Sep 2017 07:35:12 -0400, Ken D'Ambrosio wrote:
>Almost certainly your disk is dying.

From my perspective getting input/output errors means that the disk
already is dead, smartctl for sure will show pending sectors. Working
around this issue should be possible and should lead to a still somehow
usable disk, but with slowed down performance, so continuing to use it
even for something unimportant, isn't worth it.