I am going to be setting up linux on a small old internet appliance (a virgin webplayer) and I am curious if there would be any performance gain if I install part of the OS on the D.O.C. (disk on chip) of the web player (46MB of space, I believe) or should I just install everything on the hard drive that I will be mounting inside?

I know that there are a lot of sites with info about linux on the webplayer, but they all seem to be oriented around nearly no-name distributions, and one custom distribution that I have no idea if I should use it or not. I'd prefer to be able to stick with Mandrake because there are many things that I prefer and am used to.