Running bitcoin feels like its indexing my harddisk. I will probably stop running the client, because of that. I don't mind the CPU usuage, but its seek behaviour is ridiculous. Isn't there some way to keep more in memory data structures and only write them to disk when the program is stopped or when there is a lot of date to write?
What are the harddisk requirements anyway?
I'm not sure I understand your pb correctly but... I guess you could make a symlink from a virtual fs to $HOME/.bitcoin, and crontab a backup of your wallet.