Ubuntu :: Persistence In Maverick Flash Install VERY Slow

I've been butting heads with a problem for about a week now. For a while I've been running a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) off a 4 GB Kingston DataTraveller Flash Drive. Using partimage, I've managed to install this Maverick Ubuntu and load it with Audio Stuff from UbuntuStudio....plus wineasio and some Windohs audio software, then save the images of the partition usb stick (win32 livecd partition and casper-rw persistence partition).I've also done the same thing with a linuxaudio distro called pure:dyne. I restore and use either according to my needs. Obviously 4GB isn't a lot of space....so over the holidays I went out and bought the 8GB version of the DataTraveller. Two weeks later I'm still trying to get things to work right.

The problem is that when I create the casper-rw partition and boot into Ubuntu things slow to a snail's pace. Ubuntu takes over 5 minutes to boot up. Installing anything with Synaptic or whatever takes 5x as long as with the 4GB version of the flash drive. Everything works rather well....although multitasking is laborious, if possible at all. At first I thought it was the usb-key itself. After returning it (twice) I realised this just wasn't the case. 3 different flash drives had performed exactly the same way. Googling around over the last few days I found I'm not the only one to come across this problem...but still no solution.

What makes things weirder is that today I installed pure:dyne on that same stick and it works perfectly...running as smoothly (almost) as from a normal harddrive. Weirder still is the fact that pure:dyne is built from ubuntu itself...the only difference (as far as the whole usb-creation business goes) is that the persistence file/partition is named "live-rw" instead of "casper-rw".

I'd settle for pure:dyne...except it's built on "lucid" not "maverick"....two of my 3 computers have graphics driver issues with pure:dyne and the soundcard support is spotty (which is strange for a distro specialising in audio production) and wine (and therefore vst/i support) is not nearly as good. If anyone has any clue what goes on here I'd be very interested. In the meantime I'll run pure:dyne on the one computer that likes it.