The way in which duplicate questions are "closed as duplicate" without providing an obvious link to the original question and answer (i.e. user experience) definitely contributes to the "rather hostile and insular reputation and a tendency to give a poor first impression."

Thanks Chris. I agree with your assessment of the opex of using cheap drives, but I'm having difficulty persuading the project owner. I did try to find those reliability surveys without much luck (no hard data yet). It seems from my research that this particular drive is an SSDNow V+200 which is a SF-2281 controller? So this drive would meet your criteria?

Sorry, then the aim of my question was not clear. I didn't necessarily want to diagnose what's wrong with this particular drive. I wanted to know: why is auto reallocate failing (am I doing it wrong?) and is there anything I missed in the SMART data (am I reading it wrong?). I've edited the question to make it clearer why I posted it here and what I'm looking for. Thanks for the advice.

This is an offline content cache server for schools in rural zambia. All the content is replaceable. It has to be cheap because schools are budget-limited and there will be a lot of them. But it also has to be reliable because it might be 8 hours each way on bad roads to replace. I'm not allowed to ask here what drives are not "ultra-cheap crap". I thought maybe a SECURITY ERASE might fix the bad sectors, but wanted opinions of others, or on what I might have missed in the SMART data.