A few months ago we heard about these great little guys from GeIL, and now they are available. The "DAViD 100 Series" performance USB flash drives, flash memory that could give us 30MB/sec read and 20MB/sec write, 2x-200x faster than typical USB flash drives. A pretty wide range, for sure, but there is a wide range of flash drive speeds out there, some of them lower than 100k/sec(Slower than a floppy drive)! They are available now from GeIL, in configurations from 256MB to 2GB in size, and weigh a mere 25 grams, with a size meant for less than a pocket. There are other vendors out there that have similar devices, but the market has only a few of them in total.
Assuming you have a USB 2.0 compatible OS and USB 2.0 connector you are set to go. The benefit of transfer speeds this high for a flash device will be quite clear to anyone who uses it on a daily basis. I use pen drives every day for transporting tools or small amounts of data from machine to machine, and sometimes waiting for a 200MB service pack file copy can be painfully slow. Fast flash that is nearly indestructible is a great tool to have for any PC user.