Disk I/O as a bottleneck?

[Yedidyah Bar-David]

On Sun, May 08, 2011 at 07:28:49AM +0300, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Sat, May 07, 2011, guy keren wrote about "Re: Disk I/O as a bottleneck?":
> > and if you have a lot of money to spend - you could consider buying an
> > enterprise-grade SSD (e.g. from fusion I/O or from OCZ - although for
> > your use-case, some of the cheaper SSDs will do) and use it instead of
> > the hard disks. they only cost thousands of dollars for a 600GB SSD ;)
> 
> Instead of buying a huge SSD for "thousands of dollars" another option you
> might consider is to buy a relatively small SSD with just enough space to
> hold your "/" partition and swap space. Even 20 G may be enough.
> The rest of your disk - holding your source code, photos, songs, movies,
> or whatever you typically fill a terabyte with, will be a normal, cheap,
> hard disk.
> 
> Several of my friends have gone with such a setup on their latest computer,
> and they are very pleased.

I am considering, for my next laptop, and taking into account the fact
that most laptops do not have space for two disks but do have some kind
of flash memory slot ("card reader") - usually SD-something, to have the
OS on a (e.g.) SD card of 16 or 32 GB. I have no other experience with
such cards, so I do not know if they are considered durable enough, fast
enough - both random and sequential IO, both compared to SATA mechanical
disks and to SATA flash ones, etc. Comments are welcome :-)
-- 
Didi