most user-friendly external hard drive for mac?

Any suggestions?

I want one I do NOT have to format for my mac (g4 with tiger os.) One that's ready to use as soon as I hook it in.

Thanks!

formatting is SUPER easy. don't let that be a critical criteria.

btw, welcome to the forums!

I don't know if they come pre-formatted or not, but you may end up paying a fairly significant premium over purchasing one off-the-shelf from your local shop just to save yourself a few minutes in Apple's Disk Utility.

If you must, then I'm going to guess that the drives that come from MCE Tech or Other World Computing (or possibly from Apple) that will come HFS pre-formatted.

another question...

will you ever be using this on a windows machine at all?

if so, make sure to get preformatted FAT32, or format FAT32 yourself.