Performance difference when running openelec from USB?

[rskadk]

Hey, im not sure if this is posted in the right forum, but i will give it a go.

Currently i have installed openelec on a USB-stick, booting directly from this. Like i can read in the WIKI's the menu performance should be a little slow, caused by the fanart etc. At this stage i have no Crystal chip installed (But i guess this chip doesn't increase the overall menu speed)

I have some thoughts about this, and maybe somebody have tried theese..

1. Can the performance be increased by using a better USB-stick (With faster read/write rates)?
   
   
2. Is there any other options, besides mounting an SSD-disk (Expensive option), ex. mounting af flash card inside or something? (Connections through the IDE inside, should be better than using the USB-interface)
   

[chewitt]

Enable dirty regions as "1" with a noflip timeout of "1000" and you'll accelerate the GUI a little; less work is done re-writing screen areas that didn't change. Use "Confluence" as a skin as it's well designed and not too heavy on graphics. Some USB sticks are faster than others but IDE will always be faster. There is some debate about SD cards; I could swear that I'd seen reports of it working but others refute the idea and nobody has posted a success report in these forums yet - likewise for CF cards. SSD's work great and they're not so expensive if you only need a small capacity (media on NAS etc.) and you can use an older model as SATA interface speed isn't really an issue. There are some cheap IDE SSD's available from the far-east that would be perfect but I've seen mixed reports on quality.');