Deltrotter, most FW drives, and definitely Lacies, can be formatted in the Mac native format, which is called HFS+. And this is what you should do -- if you will only use this drive on a Mac, reformat it in this format. It should be very easy -- I think you can use Disk Utility to do it.
The problem comes in when you either wish to use the same FW/USB drive on a Mac and a PC, or you want a network attached storage (NAS) drive, to which your Mac can connect with no PC as a host. Then, the problem comes in that Windows wants you to use NTFS, and Mac wants you to use HFS+, for various benefits including large files. You can only have one of the two at a time, and, at least without additional software, Windows cannot even read HFS+ and Macs can read, but cannot write NTFS (I think there is third-party software that lets Windows at least read, and possibly write, to HFS+).
Beyond that, NAS cannot be formatted in system specific formats (because they still essentially have a server-on-a-chip inside them, and this server can only handle its own native format, and usually this is some kind of FAT32 variant, because the documentation says that it cannot handle >4GB files).
But FW/USB drives that only live on one kind of computer (Mac or Windows), and/or users who only need files <4GB and don't need to write to the disk using demanding tools such as Final Cut Pro or Protools -- not such a big issue then.
BTW, if I'm wrong about this, and there's a NAS that lets you write long Mac file names and use big Mac files (>4GB), please someone let me know! I lust after such a thing!
