Unable to write to Seagate Backup Plus drive on Mac

I just installed a brand new Seagate Backup Plus drive on my laptop with the goal of being able to use it on Macs and PCs.Seagate's web site says this:

Using the drive under MacOS and Windows
If you want to use the drive under Windows and MacOS, simply leave the drive in the NTFS format that it has when shipped from the factory (say No to "Do you want to use this drive with Time Machine?", if prompted). Install the included software which has a special driver that will allow the NTFS partition to be read and written under MacOS:

1. Plug in the drive.

2. Open the Seagate Backup Plus or FreeAgent GoFlex icon that appears on the desktop.

3. Double-click the Seagate Dashboard Installer.dmg (Backup Plus) or Mac Installer.dmg (GoFlex) file on the drive and follow the prompts.
   If the driver is not installed, then the drive will be read-only under MacOS.

The installation process seemed seamless, but I was never prompted to download an extra driver and it would appear that the driver either didn't install or doesn't work as advertised.

I've found a user forum via Seagate addressing the inability to write to a GoFlex drive on a Mac:

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/crawl_message?board.id=UPHD_and_PU&message.i d=3360

One solution was to download a different driver (http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24481/ntfs-3g), however when I tried this I got an error from NTFS-3G that said "NTFS-3G could not mount the Seagate Backup Plus Drive because the following problem occurred: /Library/Filesystems/fusefs.fs/Support/fusefs.kext failed to load - (libkern/kext) link error; check the system/kernel logs for errors or try kextutil(8). the MacFUSE file system is not available (71)"

I opened up the user guide, which instructed me to download MacFUSE, but the driver still wouldn't mount.

In the end, I simply re-formatted the external HD with ExFAT in order to be able to read AND write. Has anyone else had a similar problem, or found a different answer?