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Rev

That's a confusing and low-quality article used for a citation. I've done extensive work with (older) disk drives and controllers, and the explanations made little sense (and the bad grammar doesn't help). AFAIK zero-filling a drive doesn't repair or fix bad sectors. A much better article is Bad sector remapping
– sawdust
Commented Oct 25, 2016 at 23:13
I have heard of SMART. Does it specifically tell you how many sectors are left in the spare sector pool?
– enigmaticPhysicist
Commented Oct 26, 2016 at 5:16
@sawdust Thanks for the reference. I've updated the answer.
– DavidPostill ♦
Commented Oct 26, 2016 at 7:58
@enigmaticPhysicist Not directly. SMART won't tell you exactly how large the spare sector map is but it will tell you how much of it is used. Combined with the trigger information as to percentages for a SMART failure and you should be able to determine with a fair amount of accuracy just how big the spares are.
– DavidPostill ♦
Commented Oct 26, 2016 at 8:05
@sawdust zero-writing may not work because a. you need to read the zero back for the disk to do error checking and b. file based zeroing may not fill the whole block, thus miss one or more sectors - if you do do zeroing, you need to do it at sector level.
– KolonUK
Commented Oct 29, 2019 at 15:17

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