A failing disk and the first time I see S.M.A.R.T. actually working

One of the disks that are part of the software RAID powering loudhush.ro has developed a bad sector.
The bad news arrived via email, thanks to smartmontools:


The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:
Device: /dev/hdc, 1 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
For details see host's SYSLOG (default: /var/log/messages).


The good news is you can tell the disk to re-allocate the bad sector somewhere else.
I've followed the instructions here: BadBlockHowTo.txt, almost to the letter (I did some additional work removing the disk from RAID), and now the disk looks better.

I still have to replace it, since a bad block is likely to be followed by others but it's somewhat reassuring to know that smartmontools is smart enough to help.