[husker boxster]

Buy it and don't worry about it. According to stats in the IMS lawsuit, the larger design fails at approx. 1% rate.

As far as options, there are several. Direct Oil Feed is one. And there's a guy on Planet-9 who has developed a system where he drills a hole just larger than the IMS so he can pull the bearing w/o tearing the engine in half. He replaces the IMS bearing w/ a more robust version. He has 30K+ mi on his experiment so far. YMMV.

I have magnetic drain plugs on both my 987.1s. That's my protection policy. That and changing my oil every 4-5K mi. I have 46K on the LE and 40K on the CSS. Work issues interrupt my sleep more than 2 IMS cars in my garage.