using USB flash drive as main drive for Inspiron9300

hello,

i have a question regarding using USB as OS drive for my Inspiron9300.  as of right now, my hard drive is a Hitachi IDE hard drive 80GB in PentM 2ghz 2gb RAM using WinXP servicepack2.  i was thinking about turning my 8GB USB flash drive into a bootable drive and reinstall winXP on it, and use my 80GB hard drive as a backup for data.  i dont have alot of programs install in my windows.

would the USB 2.0 flash drive be faster than the IDE hard drive? and would it be possible to boot from USB drive in the 9300?

thanks in advance.