Need a good solution to external hard drive problem

I have a 500Gb external hdd, and i am having troubles thinking of solutions to my problem. I want to use it to back up time machine on my macbook as well as store around 300Gb of music, pictures, and videos. I want to have the ability to connect the hard drive to my macbook in college, but at the same time might want to connect it to a server and just share it over the network and back up time machine that way. I have read about MacFUSE, but i dont understand it completely. Is there another solution to using the NTFS File System on a mac, or is there a freeware program for windoze that will let me read a mac partitioned hard drive?

Why not partition the drive to which ever size you need, use one partition for time machine, the format the other with FAT. I have a 250MB drive that I've done that, sort of, one partition is for my wife to back up via the Airport Extreme with her Vista machine, the other I use on my mac.