Solid State Drive vs. Thumbdrive

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So I've been looking to increase my computer storage options as my main storage drives are full and I'm spending alot of time juggling programs back and forth from my Network storage drive. The Desktop that I built last year has a 120gb SSD in it and I love how fast it boots. So I was looking at getting another SSD but, then I noticed that Thumb Drives run slightly cheaper per GB then SSD. So I'm wondering what the pros and cons are of using a large Thumbdrive is over another internal SSD? Keep in mind that I tend to use 2 different computers a Desktop and a Laptop and running a Thumb Drive might reduce the need to store programs seperately on both systems. Does anyone have experience with using Thumbdrives to run programs?

An SSD is designed with faster access times. A thumbdrive will be much slower in comparison.

You could always create a RAM disk if you have spare RAM and set the software to copy to that on boot. Much faster and cheaper than SSD

This is true. A thumb/USB drive has about the same data throughput as a 4700 RPM drive, whereas an SSD is essentially like a bunch of thumb/USB drives working together in RAID 0, therefore the greatly improved data throughput performance.

I'm not sure if you can store programs on the external storage and run the same programs on both computers (assuming you're on Windows), since many programs store its settings in the registry, which is inconvenient to transfer between computers.

SSDs have a potentially longer lifespan due to generally having better wear leveling.

en.wikipedia[dot org]/wiki/Wear_leveling

For the best inexpensive highly portable external storage, I would recommend something like a Western Digital My Passport. The one I have has a 300GB 2.5" hard drive inside the case, and runs entirely off a single USB cable with no need for an external power supply.

Why not buy a conventional harddisk? It would be slower than your SSD, but a HD with 7,500 RPM is WAY faster than a thumb drive and you get a lot more storage space for your money. Most people only use an SSD for the operating system and store everything else on conventional HDs. If you want to use the HD on both your PC and your notebook, you can buy an external HD case for 20 bucks.

oddly enough sometimes external disks are cheaper pr gb than their internal yet identical (as in the actual hard drive is the same) brethren.

that said if you have a SAS enabled motherboard running a prralel raid should be fairly simple.

my main drive is a 75gb 15k hp server hard drive that i got for around 220 dollars,(about a year ago) runs the os perfectly.

I can't take a thumbdrive seriously anymore, cloud storage is too convenient.

Once you go SSD you never go back.

Y'know... Once SSD manufacturers get the whole TRIM in RAID 0 thing sorted out and the price per GB drops to more reasonable levels, I might consider replacing my HDs with a matched set of them.

Thumb drives have their place too, but I rarely (if ever) use them nowadays except for BIOS updates.

Yeah also to be fair I have a terabyte external mechanical drive that I use for movies, music, backups etc.