How useful are (new higher capacity) USB thumb drives for MBA?

[jameskohn]

I'm looking at 16GB and 32GB thumb drives ( http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/28/corsair-bringing-16gb-voyager-gt-flash-drive-to-cebit/ )
and wondering if these are not a good answer to adding disk capacity to MBA's on an "as needed" basis.

Could we put music, movies, photos, on a thumb drive to use with iLife apps? What about putting Remote Disk and other applications on a usb thumb drive to use as needed rather than permanently taking up the MBA's limited drive capacity?

 

[xUKHCx]

Certainly, you could even store the entire OS on there if you really wanted to.

 

[barefeats]

The biggest problem I see with the larger flash drives is speed. They have lower transfer rates than the premium smaller 200X flash drives (4GB Patriot Xporter Extreme PEF4G200USB).

The 200X flash drives are much faster than the 32GB flash drives but both are much slower than the internal SSD or HDD drive in the MacBook Air.

In spite of that, I'm thinking about getting both flash drives: the small fast one for quick backup of critical files and the bigger slower one for more extensive backups or overflow.

 

[jameskohn]

What about remote disk? Could we put the remote disk program on a thumb drive so that it would always be handy?