It is right on the borderline.

Right past the borderline, it seems. Throwing my 80gb drive into my Mk2a did the trick. I suppose I could have switched it back to my Mk2 for the sync process (keeping my Mk2a active with the old disk drives in it) but I just bit the bullet and went without an empeg for a couple days. I synced about 2/3 of my collection last night and began the rest of it this morning, hopefully it'll be done by the time I get home tonight.

BTW I suggest to anyone who's starting over and syncing their entire collection definitely avoid having v3 alpha on their player when they do it. I had absolutely no success syncing using v3 alpha, but once I flashed back to 2.0b13 everything worked great. Seems to me one can be semi-confident in using v3 alpha for small syncs (5 or 10 albums) but anything beyond that seems beyond its abilities.