With the popularity of Final Cut Pro and Apple's new line of Macintosh's it is often necessary to move files back and forth between a PC and MAC.  Fortunately, Apple's operating system will read FAT 32 and NTFS file systems. There is one catch.  OS X can only read from an NTFS formatted device.  It cannot write to it.  Therefore, It is recommended that you format your hard drives as FAT 32, to you can read and write to your drive on both a PC and MAC.

However, keep in mind that if you format a device as FAT 32 using Windows, the maximum partition size is 32 Gigs.  This is relatively small for today's storage requirements.  Therefore, you should use the hard drive manufacturer's formatting software so you can format your hard drive with a larger FAT 32 partition.  I myself, prefer one giant partition.

Unfortunately, if you've formatted your hard drive on a MAC using 'MAC OS X Extended', a PC cannot natively read the hard drive.  However, there is an excellent program called MAC Drive that will allow a PC to read/write to a drive formatted as 'MAC OS X Extended'