I have a New iPad, which is given by the company. I only use it to browse web page, play some games, etc. I don't use it for serious work.
I have a very old desktop PC, which I use to program/develop on.
I didn't and don't want to have a laptop.

OK, that's enough for the background. Now back to Microsoft Surface.
I have very much interesting in Surface Pro (the x86 version, I would ignore RT) because it can be either a tablet and a real laptop, and it's made by Microsoft.

My question is, should we do heavily development on Surface Pro? Such as compile a big C++ library using GCC which cost half an hour and hit the disk for millions of times?
The disk hitting on the tablet makes me hesitate. I guess (only a guess, I don't know hardware) the disk has shorter life than a normal hard disk in a PC. So maybe that kind of development will make the tablet disk die very quickly? This is what my major concern, hope someone can give clarify on it.

EDIT: Seems my original post is focused on the disk. Beside that, it will be great if you tell whether you are planing to get a Surface Pro for development.
For me, I have strong willing to get a Surface Pro as long as the price is acceptable to me.

There's this really neat feature of operating systems called file caching. It works like this: when a file is read, it's contents (or at least some of it, depending on your available memory) is stored in a memory cache. If left untouched, any subsequent accesses to this file will read from the cache instead of the disk. So, no, compiling a large C++ library will not hit the disk millions of times (especially with header guards, which are now tracked by most compilers and each header is only opened once).

And in any case, reading from flash disks does not damage them. What wears them down is writing, and that only happens when you write code and save your files to disk. I doubt you will be writing that much code to disk, and even source control doesn't really write that much either, so I would say you are worrying for nothing.

Furthermore, those drives are solid-state/flash, so they are actually much more efficient than mechanical hard drives with respect to "disk hitting". Whereas randomly accessing various files will thrash the hard drive as the head has to spin around all the time, introducing considerable latency, electronic drives will just deal with it quickly and with no moving parts getting worn down from use.

I think you should be OK.

The system specs say Surface Pro comes with a HDD ( 64 GB ), not a SSD by default, unless you upgrade to SSD

The system specs say Surface Pro comes with a HDD ( 64 GB ), not a SSD by default, unless you upgrade to SSD

Are you sure? SSDs tend to have capacities that are power-of-two, HDDs typically don't, and also usually have much larger capacities lately.

I haven't seen any reputable specs for the Surface Pro yet, anyway. Just specs for all of the other Win8 machines from other vendors.

You shouldn't use a surface pro because the Samsung series 7 and the asus vivo tab are both better

edit: I lied... asus transformer book >> all

I have an SSD in my not-at-all-portable Clevo, from what I've read, issues with SSDs aren't anything to worry about these days.

I would have thought the Surface Pro has some kind of SSD, rather than traditional hard disk (it's not clear to me that "HDD" implies not an SSD).

HDD = hard disk drive

I misread the story about the HDD / SSD on the Surface Pro. The person was talking about external hard drives ( USB 3 ).

Any way, there are no reliable sources that say what the hard drive actuality is, aside from 64 GB in storage.

Any way, there are no reliable sources that say what the hard drive actuality is, aside from 64 GB in storage.

If it is 64GB, then it is almost without a doubt an SSD. Shipping a hard drive based tablet with such a low capacity in this day and age would be an unmitigated disaster.

That may be the way Wikipedia categorises its articles, but in general, many places sell SSDs as a type of hard disk, so I wouldn't assume that just because a spec sheet or press release refers to a hard disk, it can't be an SSD. I agree it's highly likely that the Surface Pro is not a traditional hard disk, and swiftcoder makes a good point on the size.

On a related note, I have wondered - why do we not see any choice in hard disks for small devices like tablets or video media players? It's not that physically-small hard disks aren't possible, because they exist in mp3 players. It seems odd that say, almost 10 years ago you could get a 20GB mp3 player, and today you can get much larger sizes, but other kinds devices today are struggling to catch up to 20GB. I can see that flash or SSDs may have advantages, but it seems odd that there's no choice whatsoever?

I mean, given that a primary use of tablets are to play videos (there's a reason why what we now call as tablets were until recently called media players), it seems odd that you can get a 160GB device if all you want is a small thing to play mp3s, but I can only get a 64GB device at absolute maximum (and paying through the nose for it) if I want to play videos, even though video files are much larger, and the device is bigger.

Is it known yet how well the Surface (RT or Pro) works as a laptop - i.e., on your lap? It's unclear if the hinge is rigid like on a normal laptop, or would only stand up using the back-stand - and if the latter, whether that would work well on your lap.

If not, well, there are other upcoming Windows 8 tablet/laptop hybrids that will work fine as a traditional laptop. I'm more interested in the idea of "ultra-portable PC" than "tablet with optional keyboard" aspect of it, so this is something I'm curious about.