Optical Drive Has Failed - Can I disable it, what's next?

My 2 year old Mac Mini's optical drive has failed.
I had finished importing a CD and went to eject it and all I heard was grinding and the CD would not come out. I tired everything under the sun to get the disk to eject with nothing working, so I took it to my local Apple Care Center.
Their diagnosis is the optical drive has failed. So now what?
1. They removed the CD, but my Optical Drive is still grinding and it is driving me crazy (the grinding is not continuous, but happens every 8 seconds to 10 seconds)! What can I do, can I somehow disable the Optical Drive so it won't continue grinding? I have reboot several times and nothing seems to satisfy/stop this grinding Optical Drive!
2. I guess I am going to have to buy an external Optical Drive (oh joy, more cash), can anyone tell me about life w/o an internal Optical Drive and using an external optical drive? Any suggestions on which model/features I should look for? ...besides one that uses FireWire, which is a must for me.
3. I have an external hard drive which I use to backup my Mac Mini. Now that I don't have an internal Optical Drive, are there any other safety issues I should be thinking about? How about booting the Mac Mini from a disk when it crashes without an internal Optical Drive?
I am totally frustrated at this point!
Cheers, Paul

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
With no disk in the optical drive, it should be almost entirely inactive (it would be expected to make some noise initially at bootup, but should not be active after that). It makes me wonder if the disk was removed correctly, or whether the drive is still 'latched' and thus 'thinks' a disk is in place. In this situation, I'd return the unit to the Apple Store and ask them to resolve the problem, since a failed drive should not create these symptoms.
For external drives, there are a number of good solutions - see http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/optical-drives/ for some examples, starting at around $72. There should be no issue with using an external, and indeed, you are likely to find that even the cheapest of those listed provide you with rather faster performance with rather less fussiness about media brands. You are right to want a FW drive, for best performance.
As long as the external optical is connected and powered, and a valid MacOS install disk inserted, there should be no problems booting to it if required - though you may have to hold the Option key down (Alt if you are using a PC keyboard) to get to the boot loader screen, rather than C to boot directly to the optical drive.

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