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ZFS says drive is faulted, does that always mean it needs replacing?

My weekly zpool scrub came back with this:

  pool: blackhole
 state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices are faulted in response to persistent errors.
    Sufficient replicas exist for the pool to continue functioning in a
    degraded state.
action: Replace the faulted device, or use 'zpool clear' to mark the device
    repaired.
  scan: scrub repaired 0B in 02:01:59 with 0 errors on Tue Jul 11 04:02:09 2023
config:

    NAME                                    STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    blackhole                               DEGRADED     0     0     0
      raidz1-0                              DEGRADED     0     0     0
        ata-WDC_WD120EDAZ-11F3RA0_5PG8DYKC  ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-WDC_WD120EFBX-68B0EN0_5QKJ6M8B  ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-WDC_WD120EFBX-68B0EN0_5QKJTT8B  FAULTED     51     0     0  too many errors

errors: No known data errors

I only got the drive 6 months ago, well within WD's 3 year warranty so I opened a support case, but do errors like this basically always mean the drive is its way out or is it possible to have false positives?

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  • Look at your SMART data and run some tests. Reseat the SATA cables too. I’ve had that cause problems. Even had a SATA cable go bad a few times over the years. That will cause you to get these kinds of errors too. ZFS is pretty paranoid about data loss. So if it even gets a small hint that something is wrong it does t his.

    At this point it really comes down to how valuable the data is to you. Most of the time when I see this error I’m not seeing anything on SMART that would lead me to believe that there’s a problem. So I’ll clear the error and watch it. If I start to get the same problem with the same drive I’ll usually replace it when I can. That being said I have pretty good backups so it would inconvenience me a lot but it’s most likely not going to be the end of the world if my drive dies on me. YMMV

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