I’ve got a bunch of little USB flash drives hanging around. It is almost as if they rain from the sky. In fact, if you go to a trade show, they sometimes in fact do! I had a new requirement of a flash drive recently though. I wanted to actually run an application off of it. Up to now I’ve used them like a “cool” floppy disk. But now I wanted to actually put a program on it and run it from an Windows machine I walked up to. The software worked in this mode, but, to my dismay the flash drives I had were horrible at this.

Pathetic performance is documented below on one of my 1G flash cards.

Of course this problem is easily solved with a credit card and a few clicks on Newegg. I ordered the OCZ Rally2 2G accelerated drive, and solved all of my problems.

It is still no hard drive, but, the performance is very acceptable. And to boot, it’s nicely packaged with a metal enclosure and no wasted room.