Best External Hard Drive for PC and Mac

A relative wants an external HD that can take data from a PC and transfer it onto a mac with little effort (i.e. doesnt want to go through a lot of reformats). Any ideas for a good external hard drive that, right out of the box can work with both PC and Mac? Thanks for the help.

Conn206 said:

A relative wants an external HD that can take data from a PC and transfer it onto a mac with little effort (i.e. doesnt want to go through a lot of reformats). Any ideas for a good external hard drive that, right out of the box can work with both PC and Mac? Thanks for the help.

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The simplest thing is to use a hard drive formatted using FAT32. Any external hard drive will do. Don' rely on a FAT32 drive for long-term storage of important files though. That file system is rather antiquated and far more prone to developing errors and data loss vs the native file systems for Windows (NTFS) and OS X (HFS+).

If they simply need to copy from a PC to a Mac, and will NEVER need to do the opposite, then a drive formatted in NTFS will do fine. OS X can read NTFS-formatted drives perfectly well, just not write to them.

this is great, thanks for the help.