Text is wrong about CRCs: everyone uses pretty heavy ECC, so it's not just a re-read. This also provides a somewhat graduated measure of the block's actual health, so the housekeeping firmware can decide whether to stop using the block (ie, move the content elsewhere).

I'm also not a fan of buy bigger storage concept, or the conspiracy-theory on 480 v 512.

It sure would be nice if when considering a product, you could just look at some claimed stats from the vendor about time-related degradation, firmware sparing policy, etc. we shouldn't have to guess!