Recently, I have seen these quite interesting USB flash drives from Kingston:
http://www.kingston.com/us/usb/personal_business#dthx30
http://www.kingston.com/us/usb/personal_business#DTHXP30
http://www.kingston.com/us/usb/bootable
... which are all high-performance and large-capacity USB flash drives, of which the Windows To Go ones are also bootable, officially for running the Windows 8 Enterprise Windows To Go feature.
Now, say that I would like to store some VMs and run them directly from one of those USB flash drives: would it be better to choose one of the "ordinary" ones, or rather one of the Windows To Go ones, which also have TRIM support and behave more like a real SSD (and also like an internal drive)...?
Ideally, one could maybe also run an "external" Boot Camp-like configuration from the Windows To Go drive, using it both natively (of course with Apple's Boot Camp drivers installed) and from within OS X via Fusion; one could maybe also add a Linux (Ubuntu, or similar) partition to the USB key, thus getting the best of all worlds, without touching the Mac's internal HD/SSD.
Has anyone tested those types of USB keys with virtual machines? Are they good enough from the endurance point of view, for example?
They could be a good option for MacBook Airs and other capacity-limited (from the internal storage point of view) machines, for example.
It would be very interesting to know something more about all this...