From an outsider perspective, as someone who doesn't use macs much, I would have expected that OSX had NTFS support built in - most their stuff is pretty easy to pick up and use, but a problem like the thread starter had is hard to figure out if you don't know that FAT doesn't support large file sizes. I wouldn't have expected Linux to include NTFS support, but then it often takes some doing to make different things work.
So anyways, I looked into it and OSX 10.6 and higher actually do include NTFS write support built in, which would be required in order to format a USB drive with NTFS (its more widely supported by accessories than OSX or linux filesystems). However the NTFS write support is disabled in OSX and has been reported to cause some stability issues like kernel panics when enabled. (Ref:
NTFS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
That said, I wanted to mention NTFS-3G. It works on OS X, and I've used it extensively on Linux - it brings NTFS without any bugs or BS, and just works really well. Most importantly its free... Paragon sells something similar for $20. Hopefully this can save someone a few bucks.