Just to try to keep some of the flash hype in perspective:
First, and most important, Flash is not immune to corruption, particularly the multi-level-cell architectures being described here. Ironically, flash is touted for it's reliability and is being pushed as a replacement for rotating media, but in order to compete with rotating media it has to be cost reduced and more bits have to be packed into less space which directly impacts reliability.
If you read and write to a flash over and over you will see failures there too. There are no moving parts, but that doesn't stop flash from wearing out. The internal semiconductor materials do wear out and deform and have all sorts of other nasties happen. There's also risk of cosmic ray corruption and other external effects.
The simplest way to explain how flash works is to say that you are forcing current through an insulator onto a floating electrode-- you are charging the cell with static electricity. Each time you do that, you damage the insulator a little bit. Eventually it just doesn't work as well. Cosmic rays punching through the silicon leave little trails of ions that can corrupt the data.
Each memory cell stores a voltage level, and that voltage is measured to determine the bit value of the cell. The voltage is the static electricity that's been deposited there. For you to feel the jolt from a doorknob, it takes a few thousand volts. The memory cell is only holding a small number of electrons. In many of the patents described in the article, they're trying to store 4 bits per cell or more. 4 bits is 16 distinct voltage levels, which means that a few electrons leaking off, or wear and tear preventing the proper number of electrons from being deposited, is going to change the value you are reading or storing.
The memory cell itself is resistant to drops, but the components are not. Samsung rates their 64GB SSD as withstanding 1500Gs of shock. They rate their 120GB iPod grade hard drives at 1500Gs of shock, non-operating. Basically if Apple's motion sensor parks the drive before your laptop hits the floor, they're just as reliable in the face of drops.
Again comparing Samsung drives, their SSD is rated at 100MB/s sustained read, and 80MB/s sustained write. Their laptop drives are rated at just over 100MB/s sustained read and write. Where Flash really has problems though is erase time. Erasing is a painfully slow operation in Flash, it has to be done in whole blocks, and it has to be done before new data can be written to those locations. I don't know how well an SSD will hold up to virtual memory paging, for example.
Notice I compared 1.8" drives for shock and 2.5" drives for speed. SSD does manage to combine the shock and performance into the same device.
SSD's also have an operating power benefit. The hard drive pulls something like 1-2W, which isn't huge when put in context of everything else in the laptop, but it's there. The SSD should pull close to nothing when it isn't being accessed, and pulls something like a Watt when it's busy.
My point in all this is that while there is something very elegant about not having any moving parts spinning around inside my laptop, I'm not overly anxious to move to solid state drives. I don't think Flash is going to be the technology that obsolete's rotating disks. Something will, no doubt, but I don't think Flash is it. We need too much storage and we can't get that cheaply enough with solid state.
I might imagine a system like this: 128GB of solid state storage in the laptop, and 24GB of RAM so I can minimize paging, and a 500GB external 2.5" firewire drive to store media files and other large datasets. Not cheap with todays technology, that's for sure, but if applications can control their bloat over the next couple years, that might be a suitable portable system for my needs in 5 or 6 years.
