Just thought to share my experiences on installing Qubes on this nice little 
240gig USB 3.0 thumb drive equipped with SSD controller:

http://istorage-uk.com/product/datashur-ssd/

The stick has XTS-AES 256bit hardware encryption and bruteforce 
self-destruction features boosted with pretty fast read/write speeds and rugged 
design.

The original idea was to have small portable and care free persistent 
installation media for Qubes, and mitigate big bunch of evil maid type of 
attacks at the same time. Nowdays when you can already find a good selection of 
fast USB drives with big capacity, I think this type of installation on 
external drive would obviously become quite feasible compared to physical hard 
disk installations which are quite difficult to protect from physicl access.

So far after one month use, the speed has been more than enough for running 
10-15 virtual machines at the same time and all the AppVM's are launching from 
scratch in few seconds. Some read/write tests are close to what's promised 
(195M/s read and 162M/s write) Im even using the LUKS software crypto on the OS 
installation in addition to HW crypto, so there is two layers of encryption. 
Might be handy if you want to backup the whole stick to some place media 
without underlying crypto.

Only annoyance with the stick so far has been that it locks itself 
automatically right after it loses power, and for some reason there is a short 
power break in booting the Qubes, just before the graphical loading screen and 
crypto unlock. Then you just need to unlock the stick again and you are good to 
go.

Machine I'm running this is i7-6700k with 32G memory.

Happy to hear what experiences you have on running Qubes on other fast portable 
thumb drives...

-Toni

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