I'm going through the process of upgrading my laptop to make it a better workhorse. I'm trying to keep the price down so I'm looking into alternative solutions. I ordere another 8GB of Ram today and I'm going to upgrade the HD to a SSD but I suddenly got to thinking "Would it be worthwhile loading my VST instruments and samples onto an SDHC card and run them from the card reader slot?"
My thinking is that this will free up the SSD for recording while streaming any instruments from the card.
Has anyone done this and found it useful, or is this just a foolish idea?
 
Thanks

With SDHC card:
Max read speed is going to be right about 80MB/Sec.
Access time is slow compared to HD or SSD.
 
Conventional HDs sustain ~180+MB/Sec.
SSDs sustain ~520MB/Sec.
 
If you use much disk-streaming polyphony (from Kontakt or similar), it's just not fast enough to keep up.
 
If you can add a m.2 SSD to your laptop, that would be a far better solution.
If not, your best compromise solution would be to add a large SSD.
Split the large SSD into two partitions (OS and Audio).  
This isn't ideal, but at least you'd have 500+MB/Sec (total) for all duties.

If your laptop offers USB-3, you've also got the option of using external HD or SSD.