Re-mastering Proof-of-Principle Effort

[Capricorny]

Also, I've seen a few 16 Gb USBs for sale in the $25 range recently.

Sure - but what are the specs? 80/40 MB/s r/w should be enough to resemble HD performance. And slower sticks do feel slower. And what are the actual speeds obtained? I have just learned that even though a USB3 stick and HD have comparable specifications, the HD was very usable for running things like virtual machines from, but the "random access" stick was not at all. So, SSD disks or ordinary HDs seem like better choices to me. But for ordinary program running, a USB3 stick feels just fine.