USB thumbdrive install?

[TexWebslinger]

Has anyone done a USB thumbdrive install yet? Where you have multiple thumbs as your partitions and one for swap as well? I know that the r/w is life limited but wondered about speed and expected runtime of such a device? I'm thinking of a mobile environment where the moving around might "upset" a standard hard drive?

I have heard of solid state drives(thanks Charles), but they are WAY too expensive at this time for me....