My default is to use HFS+ without journaling but I'm looking to see if there are better suggestions that are reliable, fast, and allow read/write access in OS X and Linux."
ein neues union-fs (z.b. benutzt von knoppix)
FunionFS means an Union filesystem for the FUSE driver.
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/windows -o umask=0,nls=utf8
Do whatever you like, install, change and remove files from the system, and no harm whatsoever. Your real system stays untouched. This may sound like magic, but is in reality just possible by combining some techniques from all those available for Linux.