J_RaD - 7:34 pm on Apr 7, 2011 (gmt 0)

I frequently use external FireWire drives to boot Macs (including the one I am typing this on) and have never found any drawbacks other than the reduced portabilty of laptops.

well as long as your firewire bandwidth is faster then whatever on board SATA is.... you'd be losing I/O speed otherwise.