apple macbook boot lion from usb or firewire ext hdd or usb stick which of 3 better must boot?

1. Installing unto an external drive takes just a little more time, not significantly; sorry, never used a chronometer.

2. No internet connection required if installing from a local drive.

3. If you choose to install unto an external drive the internal disk remains untouched, of course.

So what about creating a bootable Lion USB drive that just boots to the OSX desktop?

That's what I want. No panel limiting my options to installing Lion or restore from a backup, etc. - I just want to be able to boot from a USB drive to the Finder so that I can run 3rd party utilities.

So what about creating a bootable Lion USB drive that just boots to the OSX desktop?

No problem. Format your USB stick with a GUID partition table, create an HFS+ file system, and point your Lion installer at the USB stick.

I've done this for both USB and SD cards.

NOTE: They do boot rather slow, but they do work.

Thanks, Bob. I did some more digging after I made my post here and found that same solution on the ProSoft Support page - of all places. ;-)

You're right too. It works, but it takes forever to set up and needs about a half an hour to boot and fully stailize (on my Macbook). Yeow.

firewire800 500GB ext hdd, how much times faster install/boot than, usb sticks 32GB?

A Firewire 800 drive will most likely take less than a minute to book (2 minutes at most). A USB drive will 5 to 10 minutes to boot. The USB drive is not fast.