What is better now for external HDD, FAT32 or NTFS?

[laptoplinux]

A few years ago, FAT32 was the only option for formatting external hard drives if you wanted to use them with something other than Windows. But now that the ntfs utilities in Linux can read and write to ntfs partitions, I'd like to revisit the topic.

I just bought another external drive, and I don't know whether to format it as FAT32 or NTFS. I'd like to be able to reliably read and write to this drive from Linux, Windows, and OSX.

I know FAT32 is an old standby, but could I get away with using ntfs this time now that the read/write utilities are better than they were even 2-3 years ago? How easily can OSX read and write to ntfs drives?

Is there any reason I might want to go with one format over the other?

Thanks!

[sayakb]

FAT32 cannot handle files >4GB in size. NTFS would be a better choice over FAT32