Questions about using an external drive as my main drive

This topic has been addressed in discussion threads before, but I'm in search of a few details.
I have a Mac mini 1.42 combo, 512 mb RAM, with an external 250 gb MiniStack FW drive. The external FW drive spins at 7200 rpm, while the internal drive in the mini is a 4200 rpm model. Because of the higher disk speed, I'm considering making my external FW drive my main drive, then reformatting my mini's internal drive to use for backup purposes only. My backups to the mini's internal drive would be bootable, so I wouldn't have to have Tiger installed on the mini's internal drive.
Additionally, I've got my iTunes library on another partition on the same external FW drive. I'm really happy with the result of that move so far.
I've experimented a bit already. I've used SuperDuper to clone my mini's drive to a different partition on the external FW drive, and confirmed that I can boot from it using the external FW drive as my startup disk, so that's not an issue.
I'm planning to move over to the external FW drive and use that as my startup disk and main drive, but keep the mini's external drive as is for a while before I reformat it and use it strictly for backups. I've got some questions before I commit to this, though. (shudder!)
*Updates for applications and Tiger-If I continue to use Apple's Software Update to conduct my software upgrades, will it automatically update the applications on my external FW drive? I'm assuming that Software Update identifies the boot drive and the app's location before performing the update. I'm concerned that Software Update will become confused once it can't identify my mini's internal drive as the 'main' disk, and will lose the functionality to handle my updates.
*Default drives for other applications-For those of you that have already moved to an external disk as your main drive, did you have to change preferences in other apps (like the MS Office Suite) to tell them where to look for files and save new docs/save updated docs? I use Office a lot for a part-time job, and it would be a pain to have to manually update all that info.
*iTunes-As I've already stated, I've moved my iTunes music library over to a partition on my external FW drive and it's worked well so far. What concerns me is the funky way that Apple requires the iTunes management files and folders be on your main drive in your Home folder, but allows the music files to reside on a different disk. When iTunes needs to update itself, or manage the music library, is it going to be happy working from the home folder on the external disk, or will I have problems? In other words, as long as the iTunes management files are on my boot drive, am I OK?
Thanks for wading through this wordy post. If I decide to make the plunge, I'll report back to the list. I'm sure a bunch of mini owners are considering the move to external drives to boost performance. I love the machine, but I can always use more speed!
Mac Mini 1.42   Mac OS X (10.4.3)   MiniStack 250 GB + Hub

No problem what so ever. I am not certain you will gain anything by it, though.

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