Sorry John....
I did a little research over the holiday into the g forces and slamming loads on planning hulls and ran that past the spec's for laptop drives....they "should" hold up but the question is for how long. Most of the specs are for "survival" after the event not constant shock events. This is almost like a low freq vibration.
I started looking into the pen drives after our conversation. You really need USB 2.0 for OS's to function at a decent speed. USB 2.0 is just taking hold but with 1Gig pen drives + on the short-term horizon, it looks to be a good choice.
I am on the waiting list for a 512mb usb 2.0 pen drive to try it out on. I have not found one in stock yet but they claim they exist. I have a cheap usb 1.0 pen drive that I got off ebay that seems to "work" but it is too sluggish to be practical. I think 2.0 offers like 10X(?) the speed so it should be improved.
The key to getting it to boot was to find a bios that allows the board to boot off of a USB port.
These pen drives are actually pretty cool, I would think for a systems guy who has to manage a load of pcs this could be a sweet thing to keep around your neck. Just pop it in and refresh an infected OS.
Back to real work....