I am always looking for a better flash drive and my current favorite is the Mushkin Atom. The Atom is not the smallest physical size drive, but it is faster than most of the competition. I use my flash drive with PortableApps, which allows me to have most of my apps on a flash drive. This is a great way to keep all your apps when switching between two Windows computers. The only downside I have found is that Google Chrome does not work as well. It is a bit slower for some reason. Firefox is my preferred browser and the PortableApps version works very well. As to the Mushkin Atom performance, I ran a quick test with USBDeview for Windows and read results were a third faster than my previous Sandisk drive.
This test was run on the Mushkin Atom 32GB USB3 flash drive with USBDeview 64. Your results may vary depending on your computer and USB port.
I have been using the Atom for about 3 months without any issues on a Windows 7 laptop.