Comment 4 for bug 438136

Looks like I have a false positive as well. Now Palimpsest is reporting the correct raw value for the "reallocated sector count," which in my case is 3268608. However, I have two reasons for thinking that Palimpsest is reporting the wrong conclusions from this wrong value. First, it appears that a similarly high value for the reallocated sector count is reported by smartctl for a *new* drive in the MacBook Air. The discussion on the smartmontools mailing list can be found here:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.utilities.smartmontools/5252

or here (same discussion):

http://marc.info/?l=smartmontools-support&m=120407420622544&w=2

While my SSD is in an X41 Thinkpad rather than a MacBook Air, it is the exact same model as the one described in the mailing list messages to which I linked above, namely a Samsung SSD with the model number MCCOE64GEMPP. For the owner of the Macbook Air, the reallocated sector count is 2617344, the same order of magnitude as mine. One of the participants in the discussion speculated, "maybe the author of the SMART code in this disk was (ab)using this attribute to track the number of times that blocks have been moved about by the wear levelling algorithm."

Second, as seen in the screenshot, the "Self Assessment" of the self-test is "Passed." Apparently, whoever was the Samsung firmware programmer who wrote the self-test wasn't bothered by the reported raw value of the reallocated sector count.

I get the same results from running smartctl from SystemRescueCD 1.3.0. The reallocated sector count is 3268608, but the self-test nonetheless reports the drive as healthy.