An apparatus and method are provided for tracking the number of permanent and temporary errors, and spare sectors used as a result of the errors, on a per disk and per drive basis. During read/write operations, a determination is made as to whether the total number of spares used to replace defective sectors on a disk exceeds a predetermined limit. This limit can be different depending upon the type of disk in use, rewritable or WORM. If the limit is exceeded, diagnostics are preferably executed to ascertain the cause of the excess usage and appropriate corrective action, such as requesting that the disk and drive lens be cleaned, is then initiated. Moreover, an attempt can be made to recover used spare sectors on a rewritable disk.