All modern hard drives definitely have sectors marked as bad. I wouldn't guess that it'd be so many as that, but I don't suppose it's impossible. Certainly the bad sector map is dynamically defined at manufacturing time, and I suppose that a drive could conceivably have more sectors bad than it it could havein order to have the remaining space be as big as the drive spec. I would think they would just trash it in that instance, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that they would just call it one size smaller.

I don't think that what he's saying is likely, but it's hardly utter bullshit.

Also, a hard drive sector marked bad is bad, period. A CPU that's not stable at a certain speed can often be made stable at that speed through significant effort put into cooling. There's no amount of effort that's going to make an unusable sector reliable.

But binsorting hard drives seems like a reasonable manufacturing method. After all, all the drives of one model come out with the exact same specs. You know that each of those drives didn't have the exact same number of bad sectors.