>it eats into most of the cache memory
>and requires the disk to spin continuously.

Mmm.. I suppose it would likely have to buffer on the order of 20 seconds worth of music, to allow time for spin-up. This might amount to say, half a megabyte or so of stolen cache space.. significant, but "okay" on a 16MB Mk2a.

And just spin the disk down when not in use, using an auto-spindown timeout value (Hijack currently uses 30 seconds, or was it 60? -- user settable).

-ml