Pleasant surprise regarding SD Card/Windows

I have a 2012 MBA 13" Core i5 1.8 with 8 gig of Ram. I got the base model with the 128 gig SSD.

I also picked up this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008AN1DHI/ref=oh_details_o06_s00_i00

to use as extra storage.

I recently took advantage of an amazon deal for NBA 2K12 for Windows for $9.99. Now I know this will run fantastic on my Mac Pro using boot camp, but currently I do not have windows installed in a boot camp environment. I do have Windows 7 installed in Paralles though. So I figured, hey lets give it a try. Running the GM of Mountain Lion and the latest Parallels, game performance was acceptable. It wasn't as smooth as boot camp would be, but it was smooth enough to save me the hassle. Mac Pro is a 1,1 with a 1 gig 4870.

So I decided to copy my VM to the SD card and give it a go on the Macbook Air. Performance is fantastic. I did not expect NBA 2K12 to run on the Air, however to my surprise, it runs smoother than it does on my Mac Pro, all off the SD card.

NBA 2K includes a video bench mark but I don't trust the numbers under parallels, as the Air gives me lower numbers than the Pro, but visually it's smoother. I'm thinking it has to do with the updated Core architecture as the Pro still out XBenches the Air.

TLDR: Windows and NBA2K12 run fantastic from a 64 gig SD card on a 2012 MBA.

Also, I moved the VM to a trial of the latest VMWare Fusion and NBA2K ran like a slide show.

I know SD cards can and do fail, but I'm not too concerned with that as I have the data backed up.

It's a ~40 gig image so it isn't caching everything.

I would imagine a huge delay in starting up if it were caching it to the HD first. It's running directly off the card. I don't think Paralles particularly cares where the file is being run from.