Call them what you want - thumb drives, USB sticks, data pens, flash drives - the little nonvolatile memory chip has been our friend since the demise of the floppy disk.
They're designed for temporary storage, and they're usually not designed to perform amazingly fast because cheaper chips make better profits.
So why have I just read my third thread about someone trying to install the Yosemite beta to a thumb drive? I mean, I applaud the decision not to install it on your primary hard drive if you're nervous about data preservation and keeping your machine functional - but please, unless your internal drive is really full, follow the instructions posted in a million places for how to install Yosemite onto a partition!
The performance you're going to get from your average TDK 32GB stick that you picked up for £9.99/$14.99/12.99 is going to suck, quite frankly. Especially if like me you're stuck with a USB 2 equipped Macintosh, but even if you've got it plugged into a USB 3 port, the 5Gbit/s transfer rate throttled by the x-00Mbit/s read/write of the flash memory is cold treacle slow compared to the internal SATA/PCIe transfer rates of your internal drive.
TL;DR:
Don't use thumb drives for operating systems unless you're using the lightest OS ever - I'm talking light like RiscOS 3, a whopping 4megabyte OS...
They're designed for temporary storage, and they're usually not designed to perform amazingly fast because cheaper chips make better profits.
So why have I just read my third thread about someone trying to install the Yosemite beta to a thumb drive? I mean, I applaud the decision not to install it on your primary hard drive if you're nervous about data preservation and keeping your machine functional - but please, unless your internal drive is really full, follow the instructions posted in a million places for how to install Yosemite onto a partition!
The performance you're going to get from your average TDK 32GB stick that you picked up for £9.99/$14.99/12.99 is going to suck, quite frankly. Especially if like me you're stuck with a USB 2 equipped Macintosh, but even if you've got it plugged into a USB 3 port, the 5Gbit/s transfer rate throttled by the x-00Mbit/s read/write of the flash memory is cold treacle slow compared to the internal SATA/PCIe transfer rates of your internal drive.
TL;DR:
Don't use thumb drives for operating systems unless you're using the lightest OS ever - I'm talking light like RiscOS 3, a whopping 4megabyte OS...