smartd: 3 Offline uncorrectable sectors

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 14:04:29 +0100,
  Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org> wrote:
> 
> What is the purpose of writing over the blocks here? Doesn't the 
> addition of the drive back into the set cause it to get re-written anyway?

If the drive thinks the problem is temporary at first even though the failure
is actually permanent, you made need to write and test the sectors a few
times to get the sectors remapped. Since waiting until after the drive is
rebuilt takes a long time, it is probably better to write and read the blocks
a few times to make sure things are OK rather than find out there are still
problems later.