And, if you
"routinely have failed hard drives," something's
wrong at your workplace! Even in continuous duty, a drive mechanism should last for years.
('Scuse me ... what's that noise ... 'click click click' ... uh oh ...)
Easily the most common cause of disk-drive failures is an even-very-slight instability in the
incoming electrical power. Drives use direct-current synchronous motors which are absolutely intolerant of any variation in current. You should have
beefy UPS = Uninterruptible Power-Supply boxes on everything. Yes, buy one for every secretary.
Their purpose is actually
not to keep the lights on when the lights go out. The battery is there to provide the means to
stabilize the current, in much the same way that a buffer-tank or column suppresses "hammer" surges in a water supply line.
Have an electrician review the wiring. Be sure, for example, that photocopiers, laser printers, and other power-hungry devices are on separate circuits from the computers. (They don't need UPSes, and will very-quickly chew them up.) These machines can send a nasty surge down the line every time they're start to do something ...
especially the older copier-equipment that is based on mirror-optics and not scanners. (Which you should get rid of, anyway.) In poorly-designed and especially "repurposed" office buildings, the culprit could be the tenant next door.
The only reason why "superblocks" might be seen as "going bad," is that they're (of course) the blocks most-frequently written. Therefore, if the drive is going fishy, this is the block that you are most likely to
realize has been corrupted ... especially given that corruption in that block can cut-off access to everything else.
Modern disk-drives have a built-in diagnostic capability, called SMART, in which the drive's own electronics keeps statistics, chooses on its own to "spare-out" questionable blocks, and so on. Linux {and all the others) does have tools that can read this information, and there are hardware-monitors (e.g. Nagios plug-ins) that can monitor it. You can often, in this way, discover a
pending failure well before it happens.
If you are proactively looking for such things . . .