Running HA from an external USB drive

I’m wondering if anyone has had any experience running HA from an external USB drive connected to an RPI. I would also like to boot from the same drive. I found some instructions for setting that up out on the RPI site https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/msd.md, but still have some questions.

  1. Is it more stable (less chance of failure) than the sd card? (I would hope so, but I need to ask).
  2. The instructions walk me through setting up the RPI to boot from the hard drive, but they stop at copying over the image and direct me to another site that isn’t as helpful. My question here is, My Harddrive is most likely going to be much larger than my sd card as far as storage goes. When I put the image on the hard drive, does it set disk partition sizes as if I was on an sd card or does it let me use larger sizes since more space is available?

I’m sure I’ll have other questions, but these will get me started.