I have finally decided and bought a Smart.drive 3.5″ external FireWire 1394a (400) and USB 2.0 combo harddisk case, instead of a FW800 one, with a Maxtor 200GB 7200rpm-8MB 3.5″ HD all for HKD$1175. A FW800 case alone would have cost HKD$880.
Since I had no idea how to format it for use with both PC and Mac, I tried partitioning and formatting it with a PC under Windows XP in NTFS with a thought that OS X 10.3.9 fully supported NTFS drives.
The formatting, as usual with WindOS machines, took about 45 minutes to format the entire drive in one go. However, I then thought I’d better partition it to two partitions of a 100GB and a 89GB drive. So it took another 45 minutes to reformat it. There I thought the formatting went quite relatively fast for such a large drive.
Upon plugging the drive to the PB17, OS X couldn’t write to it. 
As it turned out, I think my previous check with OS X 10.3.9 support for NTFS formatted drives happened to be strictly for read only. It would appear that NTFS disk writing is not supported, or at least I couldn’t do so with my limited OS X knowledge.
So, I thought I’d just repartition and reformat it again with the PB17.
The whole partitioning and formatting process in the PB17 with OS X 10.3.9 took less than 10 seconds! WTF?!
I was able to copy files to it right after that!
Wasted a good evening and much electricity…
I’m gonna try SuperDuper the PB17 internal drive to it now and see how it goes.
WhaUSay?!