Well, shoot, you guys have given me good advice and talked me down. Even more than the speed, having the nice drive stability was a plus. I probably would be better off just finding a higher speed (7200?) regular new HDD in the 40gb range that I can use for the Pismo I'm going to write on. Most of the drives I have are about at the ten to eleven year old mark. I'm going to be backing up the novel daily anyway, so I suppose the price really does outweigh any advantage.

I have a lot of RAM that I swap around in the Pismos as I use different ones...most of them have 512 or 768MB...one of these days I will get around to a 1GB maxout just to see if any better than the 768.