I did a rather unscientific test this afternoon but the initial results seem rather interesting. I rendered the same project twice. The first time, the rendered file was created on my 64 Mb thumb drive. The second time, the rendered file was created on a hard drive, but not the same file that the source files were on. My theory is that writing to the thumb drive should be faster than writing to a hard drive, so should decrease render time. The first file rendered in approximately 34 minutes, while the second trial took approximately 51 minutes. This is a huge difference, but again this was not a very scientific test. The results are so good as to make me feel somewhat skeptical. This is a pretty simple test, so I'm hoping that some other people will perform the test on their own systems and share the results. I'll include some of the information on my test below.

James

System: 1.5 Ghz Pentium IV, 640 Mb RAM, Windows XP Home.
Project: 8:47 minute video rendered to WMV file at 512 kbps. Project contains approximately 100 clips, plus audio tracks and transitions.

Trial #1: Rendered to 64 Mb thumb drive connected via USB 1.1 port
Trial #2: Rendered to primary hard drive. Source files on second physical hard drive.
Size of file produced. Trial #1: 30,463 kb. Trial #2: 30,469 kb.