What is "badblocks"

badblocks is a Linux utility to check for bad sectors on a disk drive. It creates a list of these sectors that can be used with other programs, like mkfs, so that they are not used in the future and thus do not cause corruption of data. It is part of the e2fsprogs project, and a port is available for BSD operating systems.

When run as a standalone program, badblocks gives a list of blocks with problems, if any. This makes it a good option for checking whether the disk drive is healthy independently from SMART data and file system checks.