I'm currently using an external Western Digital 300gb fire wire drive with my iMac 20 inch intel.
The drive was originally formatted for NTFS, after checking the forum and experiencing the 2gb file size limits with final cut, I found out that I needed to format the drive as a mac.

I formatted it as Mac extended with journaling (I think thats right, I'm not in front of a Mac right now).
My question is, it formatted real quick, like instantly. I was expecting it to sit and format the drive for at least several seconds if not minutes.

Its working fine, I'm able to record video with unlimited file size, is it normal for the format to be that fast?

Yes...when a modern disk is formatted, it is typically just re-written with a new directory structure. In order to do a complete format and erase, you have to dig a little more deeply into the Disk Utility program and have it "Erase Free Space". And that can be a very long process on a large disk (especially over Firewire).

I formatted it as Mac extended with journaling (I think thats right, I'm not in front of a Mac right now).
My question is, it formatted real quick, like instantly. I was expecting it to sit and format the drive for at least several seconds if not minutes.

Its working fine, I'm able to record video with unlimited file size, is it normal for the format to be that fast?

Typically you would not enable journaling on the non-system drive.

-gb-

What is Journaling? The only reason I used that was it was mentioned in the forum to use it for external drives. I've only worked with the iMac for the past week, never had a mac before. Thanks for the info.

See: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107249