I was looking around for a new memory stick (and possibly an SD card too) and obviously these days there are a number of "High-Speed" options, such as Sandisk Ultra II, Lexar 80x, Sony's "Red" sticks.

The price premium depends very much on the memory type, but generally not outrageous -although not so small that I am willing to spend the extra without doing some research first.

So my question is, do these High-Speed Flash products have any significant impact on the usage experience? For example, I'm sure my Sony V1 digicam doens't have a high enough throughput to take advantage of the Sandisk Ultra II's extra speed, but would it be much faster when I copy the contents to my computer using a card reader? I would have thought that the flush times (ie, time it takes for the file to be written to the memory from the buffer) would be better... but by how much?

PS. The Sony "Red" Hi-speed sticks mention "4-bit Parallel Transfer" - does it require any specific hardware for the increased speed, or does most hardware that supports MS Pro take advantage of the increased speed?