smartctl say bad sector but bad blocks found nothing

[JOduMonT]

Hi;

So I have a zfs mirror of 2 identical drive WD Red 3TB and smartctl complain about having a bad sector on one.
After few months and backups, I decided to replace both drive with newer driver and take the opportunity to scan them with badblocks
the command I used is

badblocks -svwo sda_badblock.log /dev/sda

after 3 days of checking for bad blocks the result for both drive is (0/0/0 errors)

So I plugged them into my TrueNas SCALE just to test and the smartctl complain about bad sector again.

What is similar on these servers ?
- Both machine are using Debian
- Both drive as been plugged with the same SATA Cable (I ordered new cable, they are on their way)

What is different on the testing machine (badblocks) ?
- I used a docking station

My 2 questions are:
- Could a bad cable make smartctl complain about bad sector ?
- What other tools would you recommend ?

 

[bobmc]

I've seen bad sata cables generate CRC error's which will cause a SMART error

The drive may have remapped the BAD sector which is why badblocks is not finding any errors. However, the drive will still have the error in it's log and will continue to report this whenever the OS queries the drive status.

The drive may continue to function quite happily for month or years but it will always have the SMART error. It's your call as to how much trust you put in this drive from now on.