External Hard drive on Windows quiery

Dont know much about setting them up. I have searched online with no sucess

I recently bought a Formac Disk Mini 160 GB which came with basically no instructions and no online help from the company.

I want to set it up so I can put things on and have them readable on a non-mac as well as on my Macbook.

You have three major choices:

1/ Format the drive for FAT32, which is readable by both OS'. The upside is that both can read it. The downside is that FAT32 is a dreadful file system that affords none of the protections of the Mac OS X file system.

2/ Format it for HFS+ Journaled, the Mac OS X file system, and get MacDrive 7 for your Windows PC. MacDrive 7 is a piece of commercial software that adds HFS+ drivers to Windows.

3/ Format the drive for NTFS, the Windows file system that is used by default by XP and Vista, and get an NTFS driver for your Mac. Paragon Software makes such a driver, and it has been tested by several members of this forum, most of whom seemed to like it. There is also NTFS-3G, an open source NTFS driver for the Mac (Linux as well, by the way - I have used the Linux version and it seems quite stable).

Thanks for the detailed response.

Is there a way that my hard drive will work on other people's windows computer without having to install anything and work smoothly on my Mac as well?

I am really just looking for the easiest/safest way to use my hard drive without having to re-do this later.

The NTFS route is the safest and best way to achieve the sort of seamless transferability you are looking for. That would be my recommendation.