On Wed, 16 Apr 2003, Caffeinate The World wrote:

> If I used scsictl to map out bad blocks, should the total sector counts
> go down in the disklabel. That is if I low level format the drive
> first, then disklabel it?

No. The spares are set aside at the time the drive is low-level
formatted. They're invisible to the OS. There are typically some on
each cylinder, and some for the whole drive. Once you run out of
sapres for a cylinder, the drive makes a lot more noise when scanning
sequentially over the replaced block(s), because the arm has to go all
the way back to the outside, and when you finally run out of
whole-drive spares, the drive is toast.

Frederick