Intel Mac hard drive query

OK... this is what I was thinking as I rode back to work this afternoon...

I have a Mac mini and three hard drives:

i) internal 5400rpm 80Gb SATA
ii) external 7200rpm 80Gb USB2
iii) external 7200rpm 400Gb Firewire

I'm wondering if it's possible to install Mac OS X on the USB2 drive and have it work quite happily there as my main OS. Will my Intel Mac boot from a USB2 drive? If anything goes wrong will disk repair tools fix USB2 disks?

Then I would reformat the internal SATA drive and put on XP or Vista as neither of those will boot from external drives.

Then use the 400Gb external Firewire for data (partition a bit as FAT32 and the rest as HFS+).

Anyone know if this scenario is likely to work before I muck it all up this evening for nothing. Is it worth it? Will using an OS on a USB2 drive seem horrendously slow?

 

Thanks for your thoughts.

I thought that because I had an external drive at 7200rpm that the system would be quicker. But of course data would be limited to the throughput of the USB. So the internal SATA drive at 5400rpm is still quicker.

I set up Boot Camp and moved my data on to my external drive. Is there anyway now that I can redirect my Home folders - Movies, Documents, Music etc to point to the Firewire drive?