Technically, Mac OS X Tiger (10.4.x) supports NTFS natively but as far as I know it can only read it and not write to it. It has been this way since 10.3.x.
Amit Singh from Google released a feature called MacFUSE which allows to implement a file system in user-mode (and not kernel mode). He then implemented a couple of such file systems, one of which is NTFS-3g which supports both read and write of the NTFS file system.
According to the FAQ of MacFUSE the write performance is quite slow due to various limitations in the Mac OS X kernel, but works (which is better than nothing...
)
I would suggest formatting the drive to FAT32 which will make it accessible from all major operating systems (Linux, Mac OS X and Windows).