Input/output errors on external mac formatted hard drive?

I have an external OWC 120 gig hard drive. I use it at work and boot it as the start up drive ( that makes it the blessed system drive when I do). Recently, I noticed that it was getting very slow at work and hanging. I ran Disk Utility on it (when it wasn't the blessed system folder just the external hard drive) but I kept getting errors on it (I forgot what the error said but it wouldn't complete the operation of fixing it).

I decided that I would clone the OWC external hard drive to a Maxtor OneTouch that I had that I haven't used. I partitioned the Maxtor hard drive and then I formatted the hard drive to Macintosh Extended (Journaled). I then cloned the hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. It ran for a while and then I got a message from the CCC software saying that I had an output/input problem. It gave me a warning question saying that there was a problem but it would make an attempt to continue. I clicked OK and CCC continued the process.

The cloning was completed today. I ran Disk Utility on the Maxtor hard drive and fixed the permissions on both verify and repair. After clicking the Verify repair and the Repair disk, it both came up green and said that there were no problems.

The question that I have is this: Now that I have cloned the OWC hard drive, can I wipe the OWC hard drive, reformat it and then clone it using the Maxtor hard drive? I mean, I know I can do it but I am wondering what the story is on the bad sectors? Will they get passed when the cloning happens? FYI, I am not getting a click of death from the OWC hard drive.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this matter.