Disk Failure?

[Stephen Bader]

Whenever I try to dump /var on one of our machines, I receive the
following errors from dump:

  DUMP: 30.11% done, finished in 1:56
  DUMP: read error from /dev/da1s1e: Invalid argument: [block
-1245853416]: count=16384
  DUMP: read error from /dev/da1s1e: Invalid argument: [sector
-1245853416]: count=512
  DUMP: read error from /dev/da1s1e: Invalid argument: [sector
-1245853415]: count=512
  DUMP: read error from /dev/da1s1e: Invalid argument: [sector
-1245853414]: count=512

It prints the above error about 500 times, and then completes the dump
(but I'm sure the data is not all there, due to the above error).

My question is, is this an indicator of a failing disk, or just a disk
that needs to be fsck'd? This is a very busy machine, and I'm also curious
if this may be caused by the fact that logs and email are being written to
the partition while the dump is going on, and if that would cause the
above error.

TIA!

-Steve