Ive looked at the idea in the past and it is faster for booting windows etc...

virtually 0 seek time etc....

actual throughput might be down a little on large files, but whatd the chance your going to be copying large fiels on and off your 4gig... plus, would you really notice the tiny difference anyway ?

iirc. booting from a flash card connected up to an IDE port will get you booted up and into windows in under 14sec.   (thats windows fully loaded and waiting for you... not just the backgroeund and start menu ready etc...)

mmm Im skeptical, even if your seek time really was 0 it would still only save you ~8-12ms per file. Youd have to access 100 files to save yourself a second, and youre going to loose some of that by going from 30+Mb/s to 10 or less transfer rate.

Depends, they might be fragmented in which case a single file can need many seeks. Windows goes through a lot of files at start up so it might make a difference. You also have to consider speed of transfer into the equation.

^^^ thats exactly it, theres no spin up time, practically 0 seak time etc. etc.