NTFS over ext3

[Crash]

I have two 250GB sata drives here that I want to format, setup a single partition on them, and use Lmce's raiding feature to use them as media storage on my hybrid.  The problem is I'm new to linux and I don't know how to format these things.  I've checked a few ubuntu forum sites figuring they'd be the place to go, but I only found explanations on how to setup the drives up using the ext3 file system, and I want to have the option of taking these drives out and plugging them into a windows computer...so I'd need NTFS.  I guess I don't need them to be NTFS, but it would be nice considering in a the next month or two I'll be upgrading to two 1TB drives and these will most likely be tossed into an extra windows machine.

Can anyone walk me through how to format these drives or reference me to a walk through? They are /dev/sdb and /dev/sbc logically. Thanks!

-crash

[skeptic]

When you move them to the winows boxes, is there any reason you can't format them as NFTS then?  What I would do is set them up for now as ext3.  When you have a couple 1TB drives and want to move these to windows, just copy the data you want to save from the 250G drives to the 1TB drives, move the 250G drives to windows, then reformat them as NTFS.

[Crash]

Yeah I figured I could do that a few minutes after I posted.  But I'm still having issues formatting them etc3.  I'm following this guide https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallingANewHardDrive, but am having issues at #7.  One of the drives went through fine, the other one gives me an error of "is apparently in us by the system; will not make a filesystem here!"

[jondecker76]

The Raid setup in web admin will format them for you. Just add the drives, power on, then in web admin go to Advanced->configuration->Raid. Create a new raid device, then select the drives from the drop-down list. Depending on the size of the array, wait a while while it formats and builds the array and you're done.

[Crash]

Here's something that's puzzling me.  

LMCE automounts the drives right? I noticed it installing the drives once I finished reformatting them, so I don't need to mount via command line do I?  

If that is correct, then why doesn't the RAID configure tool have any drives listed in the drop down menu for me to add to my RAID?