Reallocated sector count continues to climb

Boog wrote:
I had a drive that eventually failed due to reallocated sector count. It was a Seagate drive, so I e-mailed Seagate my questions; here is a paraphrase of what they had to say: The drive has extra space to deal with bad sectors being found Each time a sector is marked bad you lose all data that was held in that sector

(Digging up an old thread which I found when searching for info, as one of my drives has started reallocating sectors)

So, the first thing I was wondering is, will the ReadyNAS use the parity data to recover the lost data when a sector is reallocated?

Boog wrote:
There is a SMART threshold defined to let you know when this extra space has been used up (for me it seemed to be over 1000 sectors) Once the drive hits this SMART threshold SeaTools will return an error code and SeaGate will authorize an RMA (if the drive is in warranty)

And the second thing is, is there any way to know whether or not a drive will fail the SeaTools test? Obviously it's not desirable to keep shutting the array down for 12 hours, plugging the drive into a PC and running the test. I could do that every day for a year and never have it flagged as failed, for all I know.

Boog wrote:
The ReadyNAS device informed me once the SMART threshold had been triggered.

So by this, do you mean it gave you a different error message to the normal one saying the reallocated sector count has increased from x to y? It would certainly address my previous question if the ReadyNAS knows at what point SeaTools will consider the drive failed and sends a different error message at that point.