Catastrophic disk failure, where was smartd?

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 13:28:01 -0500,
  Roger Heflin <rogerheflin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The big issue is that most of the smart implementations don't scan the disk 
> for bad blocks, and in my experience several years ago with a 1000+ disks 
> in services was that the #1 failure was bad blocks, and smart did little to 
> catch that.    The #2 failure was failure to spin up at all, but this 
> seemed to be confined to certain batches.

Isn't that what the long surface scan test is supposed to do?