new external drive

Picked up a new 3TB WD external drive. I'm a novice at using these, and it has a file called Quick Formater for Windows I believe. It seems to be doing ok just dragging files I want to back up to it, do I need to initially run that? Another question, will I be able to hook up my external to our new Mac Book and move pictures to it? Or it is likely only to work with my XP Windows system?

 

If it works ok, out of the box, why mess with it. I don't have one of those drives, but I have bought WD externals before, and while I do backup and save the software it comes with in case I ever wanted to use it, and I never do, the bundled software is usually 'crapware' and that was reported in a couple PC Magazines I read too. Hardly anyone uses it... but who knows, maybe this 'Quick Formater for Windows' is different.

I'm guessing the format of the drive is NTFS, in which case, as long as you have a ntfs drive on your mac, to read and write to ntfs, it should work fine. The free driver I think is ntfs-3g

 

Thanks. How do I tell if it is NTFS and make it that if it isn't ?

 

when the drive is mounted in windows, right click on it in my computer and click on properties; it should state what the 'file system' is. I don't know much about how to do this on Mac, but it shouldn't be very different. Just look at the drive properties.