RAID 5 Multiple Hard-drives failure

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, Mar 15, 2006 at 07:49:59 -0600,
  Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Doing a cat of the raw device to /dev/null once in a while will
> give smartd a chance to report errors.  The drive should even
> internally remap a certain number of 'soft' errors transparently
> if it is able to recover the data with retries but again it
> will only do that if you access the bad spot.

You should be using long self tests to do surface scans of the disk.