Greetings!

9.5 mm is definately not a problem. I personally use the IBM ones, but that is because they were on the market faster.

I expect the 80GB drives will be out in the late January timeframe. IBM's press release is saying that is the target for retail markets. I expect that a) it will take a while to actually get them shipping in retail vendors, maybe February, b) Dell and other OEMs will be the first to get and sell them as upgrades to existing laptops and c) they will be mighty expensive (guessing around $490 per) when they first come out.

Keep in mind that 80 is the advertised size of the drive, referring to 80,000,000,000 bytes. Meaning that emplode will probably see it (rough guess, more mathier people than I can work out the details) as about 74GB. Still, I assume the same would apply to the Central, so as long as your comparing similar numbers...