I am with Tom. My 64Gb thumbdrive works Okay. The BUS is all wrong for the necessary throughput to give you fully comparable performance. USB (Universal Serial Bus vs. Parallel etc etc) but if you don't mind the performance hit the thumb drive, be it standard install or live install does well enough in basic operations but will be nerfed 'cause the data is driving on country roads. If you are working around your work encryption and want the performance then replacing the HD would give you the performance but would be a complete PITA every time you wanted to work on the system not to mention violating some standard policies against such things. If you are needing a system a decent refirb is an option for cheap.
My 2 bits FWIW,
Fred