Hehe.. Well, it's a key feature that differentiates it from regular hard drives which are far more susceptible to shock. I think Dashken's just sceptical about the shock-resistance of solid state flash drives like these!
I think we can do a test on this. Adrian, get a USB flash drive and drop it from 1-20 meters, then maybe throw it against the wall or something. See whether the force/shock can kill the drive.
Well, with Flash technology, they got different problem like stuck-bit, page-program bit, word/line bit stuck .. floating gate problem.. etc.. i know lots more but can't think at the moment. I was from Microcontroller background as well . With size like 256GB, it is quite impossible to have fault free flash and they will need a lot of spare column to replace any faulty bits.
Yup, they will have to allocate a substantial number of spare cells to replace dead ones. They also have to use special write levelling algorithms to ensure even use of working cells, if I'm not mistaken.
I have many brothers and sisters... have to treat them good or else they'll break down at times when you need them the most.
