Just a suggestion. Would it be possible to have the contents of the drive copied into ram upon inserting the drive? It could be done via ramdrive, but im thinking that any changes will still need to be written to the drive before unmounting. Has anyone discussed this possiblilty? It would make alot of sense if it could be done as it would dramatically increase access times and decrease flash writes.
Upon mounting you could offer an option to mount the drive normally, or mount into system memory so it would still run fine on systems with insufficient memory.
It would require admin rights... so it wouldn't be very portable.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!