Lightroom .lrcat file on external hard drive = bad?

True or False: Adobe engineers recommend against running one's LR catalog off an external hard drive (the .lrcat file, not the pictures), with the preferred method being to use a catalog (.lrcat file) that exists on the computer on which the application software is installed; the reason being that one is more likely to experience database corruption and diminishing performance if running it off a hard drive.
as background to this simple True/False: I teach in a lab setting and in past when I had students create the LR catalogs on their external hard drives I always had several corrupted catalogs and crashed drives during the semester; since implementing a workflow of students creating catalogs on the lab's computers (and copying the folder w/ the .lrcat file to their external hard drives at the end of the class for backup/home use) I've had no such incidences.
I thought I had read a post regarding this on John Nack's blog but cannot locate any reference to it. if someone can point me to some documentation in a white paper or on the web about this recommendation from Adobe's engineers it would help me convince my academic colleagues!
thank you very much in advance for any response.

Back a quite while ago there was an issue with OSX (I'm sorry but can't remember if it was specific to Tiger or Leopard) and external USB drives causing catalog corruption. If I remember correctly it had something to do with a timing problem between the OS and hardware. By chance is your lab running an older version of the OS and are the problems mostly on USB?
If not, I would agree with the other poster that improperly dismounting drives is a likely culprit. I'm in an academic environment where we're running LR on hundreds of OSX machines with very few problems (with LRCAT on the externals). Almost always it can be traced back to either bad cables, improper dismount (LR is still running), or drives that are in marginal condition. But having said that, the catalog can be fragile and students have a way of bringing that out...

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Message was edited by: Mark Hilderbrandt

Mark Hilderbrandt wrote:
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Lightroom .lrcat file on external hard drive = bad?

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