I was getting some flak the other day because my fulltext search wasn't bring up anything for very short strings such as:

" 20 GB "

I set my fulltext up for minimum length of 3 and are using BOOLEAN MODE.
Therefore a search like "100 GB" will only bring up results containing the string "100".
If I lower the minimum string length threshold to 2 characters will performance suffer?? If so, by how much? My current fulltext and table is:
Data: 1.5 GB
Index: 1 GB

I'm afraid that going to a 2 character minimum will make things deathly slow and eat up too much disk space. Plus, as soon as I reduce the min length to 2, I'm sure I will get flak because a search for "8 GB" will ignore the "8"
Is there a trick/hack that would work well in this case?
Such as using temp tables and LIKE % % ?????
Or a common keyword table reference for short strings???
Or should I just tell the hecklers that PHP can't do short strings so live with it?

Thanks
- John