One of the more interesting (and less useful) projects I undertook a few years back involved creating a bootable USB flashdrive.  The concept was simple…install a version of Linux (via PenDriveLinux) to a USB flash drive and carry your entire computer and files with you in your pocket.  Then, simply plugging the flash drive into any modern computer’s USB port and booting yielded your computer, complete with preferences, files, and system settings.  While able to get computers to boot from the first USB flash drive I tried for this project, I quickly realized that the read/write specifications of the USB drive itself have a huge impact on the overall user experience.  I researched and purchased the fastest USB flash drive I could find, an 8GB Kingston DataTraveler, which helped improve the performance to something very comperable to a regular desktop computer.

Now, Corsair Memory Inc. is claiming to have the world’s fastest 128GB USB flash drive.  With read speeds of up to 32MB/sec and write speeds of up to 25.6MB/sec, the drive uses dual controller architecture to achieve single level cell flash memory performance.  The company highlights the need for higher read/write speeds in larger drives due to the larger amount of data, and thus time it takes to transfer that data to the drive.  Unfortunately, the extra speed won’t come cheap and the drive will have an initial retail price of $399.