Unique Uses for USB Flash Drive

I'm just wondering if anybody here has ever used a flash drive to do either 1 or both of the following tasks:

1.) As a resource pool for samples.

2.) Destination to write to in realtime either MIDI or Digital Audio.  To that end, my logic flows as such.  If the Firewire protocol uses 400Meg/Sec, as does USB 2.0, then it seems reasonable that a flash drive would be able to support that app.

Thanks,
KC