Time to buy some 16gig flash drives

Well read speed wise:
DVD like 20 meg/s
High perf flash drive maybe 30-40 meg/s
2.5" 5400rpm HDD (360's times), give it max 50 meg/s

If take access time into account, i'll say flash drive is a pretty good choice. But of course, if you wanna install multiple games, buying multiple flash drives is not a good idea, cost wise. And one more thing is, cap kapak flash drive is as maybe slightly faster than DVD only, but with superior access time, it's still better than DVD.

I think they are limiting the addressing by the ports (or hubs), only 16gig per port.

Well even for same manufacturer, their flash drive model have varied speed... write speed can be as slow as 5 meg/s to 18 meg/s, read speed also like 15 meg/s to 30 meg/s... so i wouldn't say a certain brand is bad unless that's the only model they have...

Really? It's going to reformat the drive to another FS anyway, why does the existing FS matter?