Using USB drive w/PowerMac (G4 MDD)?

[coumerelli]

Dave,

Let's establish what I know:
1) Macs with PowerPC chips have the ability to boot from FireWire and use the Apple Partition Map in order to be bootable to PowerPCs.
2) Macs with Intel chips have the ability to boot from USB and use GUID in order to be bootable to Macs with Intel chips.
3) Either can use both partition schemes for data.

Which brings me to my question:
I've had issues when using SD! with my G4 and a USB drive where the computer would lock up and services would begin to crash. While searching for the answer in these forums, I ran across a parenthetical statement of yours in answer to another question which alluded to my problems:

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/forums/showpost.php?p=26015&postcount=8
(although using a USB drive with a Power PC macs is a mistake)

So, is this typical, and/or are the problems avoidable? And, can I NOT use a USB drive to backup a PowerPC that would be (potentially) restored using firewire, of course?

Edit: Maybe this post could be formatted and added to the FAQs

[dnanian]

I generally think it's a bad idea to use USB for heavy-use, high speed, high-load copying like backing up. If you're having problems that cause your Mac to crash, that could be due to all sorts of low-level issues... including USB bus lockups.