On Thu, Apr 05, 2007 at 09:15:38AM +0100, Gordon Henderson wrote:

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[*] probably an entirely defective batch of 14 Samsung Spinpoint
500G disks

Lets hope not... Keep checking those SMART values...

Failed disk #2 still reports a SMART status of "PASSED"..

Hmmm.. I'd be tempted to double check your hardware + kernel versions
then 

I think in this case it's more of a disagreement between me and the
disk about whether certain levels and patterns of bad sectors are
acceptable or not.

dd'ing the disk to /dev/null keeps reporting new UncorrectableError
sectors, which overwriting with zeroes then supposedly fixes (judging
by the increasing Reallocated_Sector_Ct), but a subsequent read from
the very same sectors reports the very same UncorrectableError errors
again, plus new errors from other sectors.

The SMART short offline tests also report "Completed: read failure".

Meanwhile, the disk still feels that that its SMART status is PASSED.

(FYI, these are Samsung Spinpoint T166S HD501LJ disks with serial
numbers in the range S0VVJ1KP3xxxxx)