Imagine you had a physical drive which had unreliable reads and writes but that would always go through eventually. In that scenario I believe you would just have abysmal latency as the OS keeps retrying - and if the latency between retries was in milliseconds the actual speed would drop next to 0.

That said, sudden unrecoverable loss of connectivity would be equivalent of yanking out a physical drive. You would want to use a journaling filesystem.