transfer from arduino to flash drive

Hi, I've only just discovered the mighty power of uC's and have a yet to receive my 'Duemilanove' through the post so this could be an extremely naive question : Would it not be possible for the Arduino to 'talk' directly to the flash drive through the FTDI chip and serial.print() commands? Aside from the theoretical/practical difficulties of writing the code, what would be the technical showstoppers? Timing? Speed?