New iMac data transfer.

[Staufman]

Hey guys,
I am still very new at this whole mac thing and I have a question. I currently own 2 windows machines. I want to use an external HDD to take my gigs and gigs worth of info off of the machines and put some on my new imac and keep some on the HDD for storage. What will i need to format the external HDD like so i can read off of the imac? Anything in particular? I will also keep the hdd attached to the imac for backup and data serving purposes. Will i be able tp access that data from both windows and mac machines? Also does anyone have reccomendation on which is a good external HDD to use? Any input and suggestions are welcome! Thanks!

 

[mad jew]

The easiest format to use would probably be FAT32. Format it on the Mac and you can bypass Windows' stupid 32GB size limitation. The main drawback is that individual files must be below 4GB. If this is a problem then maybe format it on the Mac as HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) and use an app like MacDrive on the PCs to read and write with it.