bad blocks on SATA disk: another war story and a request for advice

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

I did badblocks on the whold disk (/dev/sda).  It came up with no bad
sectors!

Now smartctl says:
ID  Attribute raw value
5   Reallocate Sector Count 0
196 Reallocation Count 18
197 Current Pending Sector 0

Why is ID 5 not 18?

ID 5 and 196 would seem to have similar descriptions.

ID 5 is "count of remapped sectors.  When the hard drive finds a
read/write/verification error, it maks the sector as "reallocated" and
transfers data to a special reserved area (spare area)."

ID 196 is the number of successful and unsuccessful attempts to
transfer from reallocated sectors to a spare area.

Surely if pending sectors has gone from 64 to 0, the previous pending
sectors must have been reallocated and hence ID 5 should be 64, or at
least some number above 0.
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