"One or more disks are failing" ?

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sat, Jul 04, 2009 at 11:41:39 +0200,
  Michael Schwendt <mschwendt at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 4 Jul 2009 07:57:46 +0000 (UTC), Scott wrote:
> 
> Filesystems (see "man badblocks") and the hard-disk itself protect against
> a first bunch of errors that can only be worked around by reallocating/ignoring
> sectors. Until the hardware failures become fatal all of a sudden. Hence
> an early warning can be helpful.

Marking bad blocks in the OS isn't really useful these days. When a modern
disk runs out of spare blocks to remap it is way past the time it should
have been replaced.