Seems like I am out of date. Any alternatives to UMSDOS?

re flash drives:

If they use USB 2.0, they'll be running at no more than 480 Mbit/s. On the other hand, SATA 6 Gbit/s is now available.

Of course, flash drives have no seek overheads (in fact, high-end solid-state storage has *negative* seek time, since data that's far from other data is likely to be on another chip and can therefore be accessed concurrently) but with the typical fragmentation of FAT32, you still need to issue lots of requests to collect the data you need.

While I'm not very confident I would lean towards the hard disk being faster than a USB flash drive. An internal solid-state drive is another matter entirely, those things are astounding.