bad block/superblock on new disk?

[M. Fioretti]

Hello list,

This is another field in which I had lots of experience, but... years
ago, so I really appreciate some pointer/refresh, because the online
searches I already tried all give old threads (don't even mention
ext4...)

I just got a brand new hard drive, and a brand new external enclosure
for it. I mounted the drive in the enclosure, attached the power
supply, connected it via USB to my Ubuntu box, powered it on, and then
went to format it:

:~$ sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdb

I got no error, tried to give it a label with e2label, and got an error.
Unfortunately, I closed that shell by mistake, so I canno copy its output.

So I tried to reformat the drive in another shell, with the same commands:

:~$ sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdb
mke2fs 1.42.13 (17-May-2015)
/dev/sdb is entire device, not just one partition!
Proceed anyway? (y,n)
Warning: could not erase sector 2: Attempt to write block to filesystem resulted in short write
Creating filesystem with 244190646 4k blocks and 61054976 inodes
Filesystem UUID: 1546a082-703f-433b-afca-41533eaac3f1
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
	   32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
	   	  4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968,
		  	   102400000, 214990848

Allocating group tables: done
Warning: could not read block 0: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read
Warning: could not erase sector 0: Attempt to write block to filesystem resulted in short write
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information:    0/7453
Warning, had trouble writing out superblocks.

Indeed, running e2label again gives this error:

sudo e2label /dev/sdb b01wes
e2label: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/sdb
Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock.

What now? Should I use e2fsck to repair the file system? If yes, how?
If not why, and what else to do?

TIA,
Marco