Want to use a Firewire external drive as my boot drive, few questions thoug

I have an old second gen ppc mini. My hard drive just died. It's been on it's last legs for months, but today it finally stopped booting totally. Ran a hardware test and the drive is bad.
Instead of having to open it, I'd rather just buy an external firewire drive. The prices are easily comparable to an internal anyway. That brings up a few questions.
1. From research on the apple discussions and just good old google, I'm finding it's mostly viable to use an external drive as a boot device, anything I should know?
2. From what I remember, when OS X is installed, the installer asks for drive to install OS to. If I select the firewire drive will it then remember that drive as the boot device, after the install is finished? I don't want to have to select it each time the machine reboots.
3. What happens with the bad internal hard drive? Can it just stay there? Since it's bad will it interfere with the mini operation? I'd rather not have to open the case.
4. Anything special about the external drive that I need to know? I found this one on buy.com...
http://www.buy.com/prod/fd-titanium-ii-firewire-usb-2-0-hard-drive-320gb-7200rpm -ieee-1394a/q/loc/101/203405880.html
Any problem with that one?
I guess if there's anything I'm not thinking of, please let me know.
Thanks...

If I were going to use an external hard drive, I would buy the case from http://www.macsales.com (one example is http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEFW91UAL1K/ ) then buy a hard drive and put it in. The hard drive, depending on manufacturer, will have either a 3 year or 5 year (Seagate is the only one warrantied for 5 years) warranty, unlike the prepackaged units that have a 1 year warranty. Also, if you can get an external case which uses any of the Oxford chipsets, they work well with our macs. Also, some people like the ministack for mac mini usage: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ministack/
You can define in system preferences, in startup disk, which hard drive you want the system to boot from.

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