2GB Apacer stick, CDN$132. That's what I just purchased locally here yesterday.

26-30MByte/sec read speed, about 35% of that when writing. FAST. Faster than the hard drives in my Empegs, but not quite as swift as the 100GB spinner unit in my Dell i9300.

So for fun, I installed Knoppix-4.02 onto the flash stick. Faster than a CDROM, but not by much. WTF?

Dug around briefly, and discovered that Knoppix screwed up the USB drivers -- the EHCI (USB2 hispeed) driver was not being loaded at boot time. After a brief amount of digging thought the minirt.gz (boot-time ramdisk file), I found the culprit: a simple typo. Fixed that, and now it starts real quick like -- boots up into OpenOffice.org much more quickly (like 10X-15X more quickly) than the native Kubuntu hard disk install on the same machine.

Cool.

Cheers