Using External HD as Primary Drive

Hi all,

My internal hard drive is behaving erratically and I suspect it may fail
soon. Unfortunately, I can't afford to replace my mac at this time and
don't trust myself enough to try and open up an iMac to replace the
drive.

I'm currently booting off an external drive but was wondering whether it
may cause problems to use an external drive as one's main drive. I
realise that firewire will be slightly slower than SATA, but what I'm
really wondering is whether the drive mechanisms inside external drives
(which I'd assume most people use primarily for backup/auxiliary drives)
are designed for the same levels of continuous use as internal drives
are.

Sorry if this is a dumb question.

André
.

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