On Fri, 4 Nov 2011, Jérôme Poulin wrote:

Exactly, with the new drives, they try to hide errors as much as they
can, as soon as SMART shows anything suspect, READ DMA failures,
pending sectors, offline uncorrectable sectors, or any tests fail, the
disk is going to die soon.

Pending sectors (READ ERROR) is not as bad as equivalent write errors.

A 2TB drive has a bit error rate meaning it'll be according to spec if it 
throws you a read error very 6 times you read all data from it.

So saying read errors and pending sectors are a strong indication of 
impending doom is an exaggeration.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike@swm.pp.se