The reason I have this laptop is that it's small, light, self contained, and goes several hours on battery.

Doing this one-time swap thing and having a 60 GB external drive to do whatever with, is way more convenient to me than still having the 60 GB in the computer and needing to be tethered to an external drive and a power source for the drive whenever I want to get at those files.

I could go for a 160 GB drive but it's only 5400 RPM, or a 100 GB drive that spins at 7200 RPM. This is only a Centrino Pentium M 1.7 GHz with 512 MB of ram and some ATI 32 MB video card that's separate from the mobo, so it's no speed demon, but the 7200 RPM and maybe some more ram might speed things up a bit.