[G4] External Drive Case Firewire vs. USB 2

[Richard M. Kriss]

Hello to all... I unsubscribed for vacation and forgot to subscribe when I
returned.  Hopefully, I am now back on the digest list.

I am planning to buy an external hard drive enclosure for my spare Seagate
80 GB SATA drive and the sellers really push the USB 2.0 interface rather
than firewire for the enclosures.  I don' think a G4 will boot from a USB
drive but understand the new Intel based Mac's will startup from a USB
drive.  Can someone confirm the Intel Mac's will boot via a USB port?

If I really wanted an external boot drive for this G4, I would look for a
firewire drive; however, my wife's Dell Latitude XP Pro does not have a
firewire interface.  I plan to partition the external drive to backup the
Dell PC as well as personal files from this G4.  Anybody had success in
using an external drive for both Mac and PC files?

Also, any advantage to adding a software or hardware fix to have the G4 see
more than 128 GB?  I have a Seagate 200 GB as my primary and a Western
Digital 160 GB as the backup in this G4-1GHz-AGP and they are only half
used.  The G4 thinks they are both 128 GB drives.

Dick