...but I wanted to document this somewhere, so I can refer to it in the future.
I received a LaCie 500GB "rikiki" drive today that i'd ordered off of Amazon. This is a great little drive that is powered off of the USB port, so no need to lug around an extra power adaptor :) The plan is to use it with both my MacBook at home, and my Win7 machine at work.
Unfortunately, the built-in setup software only allowed 468GB for Mac only, and 32GB Max as a 'shared' partition (both Mac OS X and Windows). So I decided to format it completely on my windows machine, creating a 500GB NTFS fileshare. Little did I know at the time, that Mac OS X has just Read-only access to NTFS shares by default... :(
However, following these simple steps allows the drive to be mounted as read/write;
Open Terminal
'diskutil info /Volumes/volume_name'
'sudo nano /etc/fstab'
'LABEL=volume_name none ntfs rw'
ctrl-x to exit, y to save
Restart and reconnect the drive
This enables the NTFS share to be mounted as read/write! :)