Combo USB/Firewire drives

[giorgio gomelsky]

I was given a 200GB Western Digital Combo USB/Firewire drive as a  
present and want to use it to consolidate archiving/backing up FCPro-
edited QT .mov files, some of which are now backed up through ethernet 
networking on a W2K PC(NTFS)- slow process - and some are still on a 
TiBook-attached firewire drive(MacExtended), which I'd like to clean
up for a new project.

What would be best (and fastest transfer/copying) solution? And what
filesystem format should I use. Does OsX 10.2.8 recognize NTFS?
FAT and FAT32 have filsesize limitations, no good for long .mov files.
What I'm asking really is, are USB/Firewire drives platform agnostic 
and for them to be so what filesystem is best?