Is a 301 redirect of a whole folder a bad move?

How long will it take for 301 redirect to transfer PR

[TreyJ45]

We are currently in the process of changing over our web site and I have seen the opportunity to improve the relevance of one of our topic folders. Right now the name the main folder most of our products are in is not relevant to the products. So what I was thinking of was doing a 301 redirect of all our product pages into a newly titled folder where the folder name would be searched for when people look for our products. I am just a little worried what this may do to our current rankings in search engines. We are ranked well for some of our products and keywords, and a little over half of the people getting to our page is via search results Most of these product pages have a PR of 3 or 2. Our home page is a PR 5 so I assume it is getting indexed at a decent rate. Do you think this would be worth it to switch over to a much more relevant folder? Any ideas on how long it would take for the value to transfer over to the new folder? I know the extra benefit would help in the long run but dont want to kill our sales in the meantime.
Thanks

[Slinger]

If you choose to do this, do only a few pages at a time.

Be assured, your idea, although it makes perfect sense, will be seen by the creepy G crawler and you will be severly punished for your organizational skills.

Unless this move will bring you an eventual increase in standing, ask yourself...is it worth what -could- happen? What will gain by having all those pages have to start all over again in G? Is it broken...or are you fixing something that works?

The big "G" monster doesnt like change. And thats what your talking about here. Change. Well, dont be surprised when the only change you get is a lower Page Rank in a few months and many of your keywords not coming up in the Search Results where you are so warm and cozy with them now.

Only if you see the benefits would put you in a better place than you are now, I would be very very cautious.

How would you like a homepage Rank of "2"? Thats what could happen.

Just call me DOOMSDAY! :0