I've found differences in behavior and performance depending on what does the partitioning and filesystem creation. The most reliable combination I found for 4GB and larger drives was to put them in an OSX machine, partition them using Disk Utility using an Apple Partition scheme, but only 1 partition of free space. Then take the drive and put it into the SE/30, and create a Mac Driver partition and Macintosh partition using a patched version of HD SC Setup 7.3.5 (patch mirrored here: http://synack.net/~bbraun/apple-hd-sc-setup-735-patch.hqx) to allow partitioning of non-Apple disks. Just remember, only 2GB or smaller partitions for maximum compatibility.
The next best solution I've encountered is Lido: http://www.euronet.nl/users/ernstoud/lido7.html