Hard drive in the pre-IDE days used to come with defect tables (a sticker on the unit) that told you the bad sectors. Of course, this is when hard drives were

Hard drive in the pre-IDE days used to come with defect tables (a sticker on the unit) that told you the bad sectors. Of course, this is when hard drives were several hundred dollars in 80's money if I'm remembering right. Flash drive manufacturers whose devices sell at your local department store for under $15 probably don't want to give people a way to check what's really going on and make a case to return them. I would love an open-source standard storage device platform, though, with a standard firmware update process over USB or whichever interconnect. Then open-source storage device firmware could be developed which could have any other extra functions you could dream of.