Lately i've become addicted to portable apps, and I've been on a mission to find the best option (in my opinion) for portable storage, speed, reliability, and lifespan.
After buying and testing 4 USB stick drives, and two usb mini hard drives, i've found that the new WD passport pocket hard drive is by far the best device on the market for portable apps.
After trying out four different USB stick drives (memorex travel drive, sandisk cruzer etc..) I was very disappointed in the speed that all my portable apps were loading. Firefox was lagging pretty bad on all four of the usb stick drives I tested. I was also worried about the lifespan of these drives, because i know that they only last for a certain amount of writes/rewrites and can die pretty quick under heavy use.
This is when I decided to try the new USB mini hard drives that have been coming out recently.
First i tried the 6GB memorex mega travel drive:
http://www.memorex.com/html/products_detail.php?section=3&CID=12&SID=16&...
I was excited to try this type of drive at first, but soon found out it was terribly slow and i could barely run firefox on it. Files transfers were also unbearable, and it took 30 minutes just to transfer all my portable apps to it.
Not wanting to give up just yet, i tried the new 6GB WD passport pocket hard drive and was extremely impressed:
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=226
The performance of this drive is amazing. After pulling it out of the package, it just felt like it was made much better and more sturdy than the memorex mega travel drive. I was able to transfer 230MB to it in under 30 seconds. Firefox and thunderbird run just as fast as they do from my hard drive. I honestly can't tell the difference in speed. After this experience, I really don't see why anyone would ever want to buy any other usb drive on the market right now unless you need something extremely tiny, but even then, this WD mini drive is about the size of a match book. It definitely won't get in your way 
It also won't die really fast under heavy use like the USB stick drives.
If anyone of you are still trying to find the right drive to buy, this wd passport pocket hard drive is definitely your best bet.
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=226
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You sound like a WD commercial ;^)
This may be a good thread to post performance results. I have 2 USB 2.0 drives.
My main one is a Cornice 1G USB hard drive. PFF and PTB are both pretty slow running off it. PTB was slow enough that I played with syncing the profile between the PTB on the USB HD and TB on my home PC (a process that never really worked well). Since then I changed jobs and PTB doesn't work at work any more. :^( In both cases I installed PFF locally on my work PC for better performance.
The other is a 256M Sandisk from WalMart that I won. It's not quite big enough to replace the Cornice so I haven't done too much with it yet. But copying files on and off it is definitely much faster than the Cornice.
I installed the free version of HDTach ( http://www.simplisoftware.com ) which does a read test of drives. The Cornice speed was 5 ms and the Sandisk was 12.5 ms.
Well, if you think 100,000 to 1,000,000 writes will be used up "pretty quickly." Even under heavy use, the drive should last you about 2 years with that many write cycles.
The biggest problem with pocket hard drives is durability. You can't drop a hard drive too often and expect it to last long. Same thing goes for sending it through the wash (believe it or not, USB keys can survive this). If none of these are an issue, then yes, I agree that a hard drive is the way to go. You get plenty of storage for portable applications, and it'll last a lot longer under normal use.
They certainly can servive the wash, mine's been through at least three times !
Yours
Steve Lamerton
Developer Profile Sync & PortaLog
In my experience the biggest problem with external hard drives is the temptation to play with the partitioning table.
When you have 80 gigs floating around you very quickly start to wonder why you can't just install an OS, or have different partitions for different needs, or whether you want NTFS or FAT32, etc. With freedom comes opportunity to mistakes.
I'll keep my external but can certainly understand why some might prefer the simplicity of Flash memory.
Remember the WD usb pocket drives arent the same thing as a normal external 80GB drive. These pocket drives are tiny. A little longer and wider than a usb stick drive, but the benfits are worth it:)
Sorry about my original post sounding like a commercial. I was just excited that I finally found a drive that was really fast and had lots of space etc