Peter,

These two articles might be of some interest to you.  Although they don't 
involve USB flash drives, they do look at what performance can be gained 
from non-mechanical (i.e., solid state) drives compared to conventional hard 
drives.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2982

and

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480&p=1

It looks like solid state drives definitely are in the future, but I'm not 
sure that we're there, yet.

John
_____________________
Original message:

Date:    Mon, 28 May 2007 08:02:54 -0700
From:    Peter Shkabara <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: boot from flash RAM

The price 1 and 2 GB flash RAM devices has come down a lot. It would seem
that booting from such a device, and having it as the "C:" drive would
improve performance. Has anyone tried doing so yet? I am planning to try it,
but don't yet have a large enough device to do so. 

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