alt Hacker NewsHard disks used to come with a paper label listing their bad sectors. (They still come with a list, it's just now it is hidden in the firmware like you describe.)
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lxgr • today at 12:58 PM
And the firmware remaps them, as far as I know. That's very different from a firmware exposing a bad sector list to the host, which is the case for some flash systems, I believe.
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I do some retro-computing every now and then and of these old drives that still work (about a 50% chance), when I format them assuming all sectors are good, they will inevitably report the same bad sectors as is on the label.
I don't really know why "bad sectors are still bad after 40 years" is so surprising to me, but there you go.