External Drives: 2.5" (portable)? Interface for booting up (USB/Firewire)?

It's getting hard out there to find an external drive that has both USB and Firewire connections. But if something goes wrong with my system and I need to boot up from an external, does the iMac G5 require the external to be Firewire?
Also, there are a lot of external drives that are described as "portable" (2.5"). Can I use one of those portable drives as an external drive for a desktop system (like iMac G5 - has 3.5" internal drive)? Or are these 2.5" portable drives meant to be used just for laptops?
Thanks all.

Yes, the boot drive had to be firewire, but you can use a 2.5 portable as long as it has OS X on it and is firewire(I use SuperDuper! to make a bootable clone).

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