Can I run Mavericks from an external hard drive while keeping Snow Leopard?

Hi there,
I have a Macbook 5.2 which runs ok with Snow Leopard but I was wondering if I should upgrade to Mavericks now. Because I'm not sure how the new operating system will run on my machine I thought I could install Mavericks on an external USB hard drive and boot from there to evaluate if it runs fine for me.
Not sure if this is possible as I understand that 10.6 and Lion/ML/Mavericks have different filesystems etc... Don't want to upgrade, realise that 10.9 is not running smoothly for me and having to downgrade to Snow Leopard again - which if I remember well what I read a while ago it is not a straightforward operation....
Any ideas?
Many thanks
Mike

Yes it's possible and quite easy.  However, do not install on a thumb drive - I've tried this with a 16gb and it's slower than a bread wagon with biscuit wheels.
Now I'm running a lacie external 500gb drive (partitioned) and a firewire 800 cable on macbook pro with Mavericks.  Now it's smokin fast, faster that running my base hard-drive on snow leopard, however the external drive with mavericks osx is still dependent on the guts and performance of the macbook itself.

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