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Network buffers are a completely different animal, also harder to optimize...

Disk IO buffers, it's easy nowadays, just use something like a MB, which is just fine for almost any application, and doesn't stack up to much memory use (unless you're writing many files concurrently, which can bring it's own problems as well)

That actually does sound about right, but do you know how to derive that? I'm curious how to figure it out.

Judging by the post here, 512kb buffers seems like a good bet?

For a an SSD with 2GB/s throughput and the syscall overhead of OS X: yes. Go higher if you want some headroom for the next generation of faster SSDs.

Just do a test with dd or some small piece of code. Why rely on heresay.