Hi Roland,
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Anyway, just to tell about the background: I`m trying to replace my home server with a Dockstar. As this runs 24/7 i want something energy-efficient for that. I got some Dockstars for so cheap and they are asbolute fantastic and just perfect fit to be run with debian. I plan buying a solid state sata disk with sata2usb one day, but seeing two ordinary disks with 2 different ide2usb fail does not encourage me to spend bucks on something new. I want a robust system where i can use more than "some" drives which are just compatible by chance. From what i have tested, the debian install on dockstar runs pretty well, stable and fast.
In my personal experience, "robust" and "usb" do not mix well in one sentence. Maybe I'm somewhat conservative, but just in another product I have seen spurious USB dis- and reconnects after days and weeks of otherwise solid functioning. Of course they _did_ mess up the software and crash the system. So be sure that your software stack can cope with something like that.
In effect, currently I would not try to design a "robust system" (ready to be sold as a product) with its primary rootfilesystem on a USB storage device. For IDE/ATA/SATA all the problems in a running system that I have seen have had their cause in the device, not in the interconnect method. This is not something I can say about USB.
Cheers Detlev