As I understand it, the drive's firmware should recognise these sectors and re-map the drive - a surfeit of sectors being part of the manufacturer's deal, but does the OS play a part in all this?
As I understand it, modern HDD firmware handles bad sectors and remaps as you correctly state, but this should be invisible to the OS. If the OS detects bad sectors, you've got problems, either the HDD firmware can't handle it or has run out of spares.
SSD a bit different and has the ability to evenly distribute wear across the blocks.