I'm just finished compiling bitcoind 0.8.3 on my RPi, running pidora (instead of, what most people seem to run, raspbian).
I too feared the SD card wearing out pretty quickly so I expored a little iSCSI LUN from my Synology NAS to the Pi and put the whole bitcoin datadir on that LUN. This can also be done using NFS or Samba of course, YMMV.
You can even put your swap on the exported LUN. I'm not sure which is faster, but it at least doesn't wear my SD card out this way!
I'm now downloading the bootstrap.dat to see if I can use that as a "kickstarter".