Sharing external drive among several Macintosh computers

Hi everyone,
I need a seemingly simple solution for my home. 3 Macs, all connected to the same router (hence in the same subnet, on the same network) should all be able to access an external firewire hard drive connected to one of the macs.
I'm surprised, confused and disappointed that this is so hard, even impossible(?). Once again: one of the Macs is constantly turned on and has a firewire hard drive constantly mounted on the desktop. This firewire HDD should be accessible for all other Macs on the network to save photos to, backups to, etc..
I'm avoiding a LAN drive because I cannot format it to HFS+ and I believe FAT and network file system will have limitations as opposed to the native HFS+. Additionally since I have a gigabit network I'd like to be able to utilise this high bandwith for file transfers and not limit myself to 100MB/s that the external LAN drives support.
Any help will be highly appreciated, thanks!
Roman

Just for the record, and perhaps to help others who faced this problem:
I haven't found a way to share a USB drive, like I wrote in my post. To my pleasant surprise a firewire drive can be shared splendidly.

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and I am having issues with file format.
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Sharing external drive among several Macintosh computers

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