badblocks cannot find any badblocks

I have an external USB WD disk (with physical and logical block size 512), which reports self test fail in smart with certain LBA. I tried to use badblocks to locate all the failed sectors/blocks, but it always finished the test with "Pass completed, 0 bad blocks found (0/0/0 errors)" regardless using or not using -w option. Does it mean that badblocks may miss some error?