Good feedback from everyone - thanks!

I'm going to check out the SD2 thing, for sure.

Not too worried about computer overhead (I can strip lot's of default overhead from the system with a few UNIX commands. Actually, even without UNIX, for those interested, you can unload lot's of overhead by going to the Activity monitor in Applications> Utilites, and Stopping many unneeded things that are running in the background. They run again on re-boot). The panel shows how much memory (hard and virtual) is being used.

Thanks again!