I found an image here: http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/amazon-launches-snowball-a-...

Weird - something about the form factor makes me want to violently toss it off a loading dock. Anyone know how much that would translate to in Gs? (The article says it will survive 6 Gs of shock.)

A whole lot. It depends on how fast it is going. See http://measurespeed.com/deceleration-calculator.php for a quick-and-dirty overview. Gravity accelerates at at 9.8m/s², so if it fell for one second before impacting the ground, and took (for instance) 0.05 seconds to deform before coming to a halt, it'd have experienced 8.91 Gs of shock.

> 0.05 seconds to deform before coming to a halt

I always found it amusing that hard drives were rated in the hundreds of Gs until someone reminded me that 'time to stop' when dropped on a hard surface was very short indeed...

One second is a long time. That's a drop of 16 feet?

For the purpose of conjecture, yes :-)