The trick is to make sure the hard drive is parked during high accelerations. I would guess that the computer often undergoes a short period of "zero-g" (while it's falling!) before it hits.
So the idea, if it isn't being done already, is to detect low acceleration, and park the hard drive if it occurs. That way it's already parked when the high acceleration hits.
A little solid-state accelerometer detecting acceleration along 3 orthogonal axes and sending the "Uh-oh" if all three register less than some set number of g's simultaneously would be money well spent -- I think.
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IBM may be on to this. See New York times story below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/16/technology/circuits/16safe.html
Hurtling From Cliff, Hard Drive Finds Parachute
By MICHEL MARRIOTTPublished: October 16, 2003
For years, computer laptops and notebooks have grown steadily in power and performance, but so far none of them bounce. The ultimate computer crash is all too often the fatal error of accidentally dropping one, leaving yourself with a cracked monitor or, worse, a rattled hard drive, which can make it costly or impossible to recover data.
I.B.M. now offers a solution to the banged-up hard drive in an updated line of ThinkPad notebooks. The technology, which the company calls Active Protection System, or A.P.S., uses a microchip that, like the sensors in automobile airbag systems, can almost instantly detect trouble.
For a falling laptop, the trouble is in the acceleration toward the ground. But in half a second, A.P.S. temporarily locks away the hard drive's read-write head, a vital but fragile component that looks and behaves much like a phonograph arm and needle, said Bob Page, an I.B.M. spokesman. When the system detects that the notebook is at rest, the read-write head is returned to its functioning position, ideally undamaged and ready to resume operations.
The first computers to incorporate A.P.S. are the ThinkPad R50 (starting at $1,529) and T41 notebooks ($1,649 and up), available at www.ibm.com. If the new technology works as well as I.B.M. promises, an attack of butterfingers will not necessarily be fatal.
I've seen embedded PC's (which are smaller than laptops but function like desktops dedicated to a specific task) which use flash memory instead of hard drives. However, these are rarely used in Windows applications, probably because Windows is very abusive to hard drives, and flash memory has a limited number of write cycles (one or more millions of writes per block). BTW CF type flash memory (used in digital cameras most often) does emulate an ATA type hard drive , also called IDE).