Can I plug my formerly windows-used external hard drive full of data into my macbook?

I have a western digital 80 gig full of music etc. which was formerly used with my windows machine. Can I just plug it into the macbook usb and have it read my music or would that not work/be bad?

if its formated ntfs then its read only if its formated fat/fat32 then you can read and write

It will work just fine. When I moved from PC to Mac that is exactly how I transferred all my files across to the Mac. Worked very well.

Thanks for the responses. I used my windows machine to find out that the hard drive was in fact formatted fat 32. So then I plugged it into my macbook without a hitch and was able to read all the data. :black:

The only thing I would add is that when disconnecting the drive, you have to first eject it using finder. On my windows machine, I could simply unplug it. I only know this because one time I didn't eject it first. OS X immediately scolded me and warned that I could lose data if I didn't first eject the drive (although I didn't lose any data, thank god).

This is true with any mounted volume, be it a DVD, Ext HD or iPod, well not so much for discs but in the case of an ext HD or iPod, it's very important to eject the volume correctly. With discs you can eject them using the keyboard eject button or by dragging the disc icon to the Trash.