I run final cut off of a Mac mini and it works great. Not quite as fast as the big boys but it runs with no problems at all. The only problem you run into with running Final Cut on the Mini is that you run out of storage space really quick. I have about four 300GB externals all chained together if I need to get some more storage space. (I'm running FCP 4.5 HD on my mini without any problems)

When formatting a drive for Mac just remember that FAT32 can only write 2GB of info at a time so if you have a file that is bigger than 2GB you can't get it onto a FAT32 drive without breaking it up with some sort of compression program.

As for NTFS I had a drive set up with this for moving information between a Mac and a PC and it wasn't as stable as a Mac formatted partition. Then again it could have been the HD I was using at the time. It's easier to set up a network for this. Which is how I worked around this problem.

EDIT:SPELLING