How can I good performance from an OSX install on a USB stick?

Question

I installed OSX on a USB stick, using a HFS+ filesystem. Although the OS is fully functional, it is incredibly slow, with frequent spinning wheel cursor.

I am using the fastest (and most expensive) USB2 flash stick I could find: Corsair Flash Voyager GTR, which is rated as 28MB/s write speed, which should be plenty. With it, I boot a 2007 mac mini, which has a USB2 interface.

My suspicion is that the slow performance is caused by the fact that there may be no write cache. Is there any way I can tell OSX to cache the writes to the USB stick, and use a large chunk of RAM to cache these writes?

CORSAIR FLASH DISK:
  Capacity: 31.62 GB (31,620,931,584 bytes)
  Available:    14.51 GB (14,508,220,416 bytes)
  Writable: Yes
  File System:  Journaled HFS+
  BSD Name: disk1s2
  Mount Point:  /Volumes/CORSAIR FLASH DISK

Answer 1

I think the most you can do is as follows:

1. Get an ultra-fast USB drive (sounds like you've done that)

2. Format it with a non-journaled File system (not a great idea for stability, but will speed things up)

3. Disable swap (not sure how to do this is OSX, but there must be a way)

Regardless, USB 2.0 (60MB/s), is fundamentally slower than SATA 2 (~275MB/s).