From what I've been able to determine, the "Current Pending Sector Count" is the number of bad sectors that for some reason cannot be remapped as bad, whether it's a glitch in the firmware of the hard drive, or there are no more reserve sectors into which to map them, or some other reason. When the CPSC is non-zero, it is bad news because the hard drive cannot reallocate any more bad sectors.

Of course, I may have completely misunderstood all that...

Right now I am backing up 1.72 TB (out of 1.81 total, 95% of capacity) onto the formerly defunct L:\ drive. The backup runs alphabetically by author (that's how the files are sorted) and before it always crashed at "Feehan, Christine...". It is currently at "Hugo, Victor..." and chugging along nicely.

Fingers crossed...

tanstaafl.