@cinowell
What do you mean with "faster loading"? The boot time?
From the moment I push the power button, it takes 122 seconds till I see a TV channel.
I use a very old 2 GB Transcend JetFlash as externel system storage.
It is not really fast, but as I mostly don't power off completely, I can live with that.
Note: As "HDD" drive I use a Verbatim Store 'n' Go V3 Drive 16GB. This stick is cheap an fast.
Write speed ~8Mb/s - Read speed ~28MB/s (tested with WinXP SP3 by using the USB2-Port)
Probably this verbatim stick would be able to boot 20% - 40% faster (or more) than my slow Transcend Jetflash.
By the way: I've made the experience that high speed sticks are not recommended. I have already destroyed 3 very fast usb sticks within a view days. My colleque also reported that he has destroyed two high speed sticks. The problem seems to be that such sticks don't like many write cycles and such sticks also don't like if you format or partition too often. Therefore I prefer my oldest usb drives as external system drives (slow but robust).