best filesystem to use in mac osx

i am planning on buying a macbook very soon, prob a black one!! and i'm going to use a massive external storage device to backup/ and store videos etc. However, i also want to be able to fully read/write to this drive in windows and osx? whats the best filesystem to use?

Any advice would be great.

Dave

FAT32... Im formating my hard drive to this file system now.

Tobywuk is correct, Fat32 will work on both but remember there will be a 4GB file size limit.

tobywuk said:

FAT32... Im formating my hard drive to this file system now.

Click to expand...

Yes except FAT has no security. Anytime you invite Windows to the party you're really putting yourself at risk.

ah ok, that might be a problem, as i may need to put *.iso files on there, can i use osx's filesystem on the drive? is there a plugin to use mac osx file system (whatever it's called) on a windows machine.

You could make it NTFS and then use MacFuse to write to it. Not sure about the @fairly security thing though...

Also keep in mind that if you are transferring files through the network the FS doesn't matter, anything can write to anything.

EX: Mac wants to transfer a file to the external NTFS connected to the PC through the network, it will work

But for direct connection the FS must be readable. I formatted my external to use the Apple FS and if for some crazy reason I need to use it on my PC I just use it throught he network.

There's this windows app called HFSexplorer which can read mac HFS formatted drives...useful for bootcamp and such.