Ok, let's redo that.
I took that as:
"I suppose you can also turn the drive's bad sector management off".
Apparently, judging from your later responses, and from another sentence
that similarly didn't make sense either, you probably meant to say:
" I suppose you may have turned off the drive's bad sector management "
It would mean the OS (and user) would see a bad sector that might
otherwise be taken care of by the drive.
Not with unrecoverable read error bad sectors. These will not be automa-
tically 'taken care of' by the drive. Only recoverable read error bad sec-
tors are. Unrecoverable read bad sectors are only taken care of on writes.
Bad sector management is not actually about managing bad sectors but
about managing 'soon to be' bad sectors, before they actually become
unrecoverable bad sectors.
So, in both cases the result would have been the same.
(Almost) All drives have
bad sectors, and there's nothing wrong with having a few, but
usually on modern drives they're transparently substituted out.
That's the plan.
Unfortunately the drive cannot distinguish between physical bad sectors
and bad sector writes where the write has not been completed in a power
failure or where a write went badly due to too high a drive temperature.
It's when there are so many that they overwhelm the spares, or when
they grow rapidly, that there's a problem.
That's correct.