A common problem encountered is the ability to read and write to a hard drive on both Windows and Mac operating systems. External hard drive on used on Windows machines are generally formatted with either NTFS or FAT32. macOS can read either of these filesystems, but it cannot write to them. External hard drives used on macOS are generally formatted with the Mac OS Extended filesystem. There are of course third party applications which allows for the reading and writing to drives formatted to a specific filesystem, but the ideal scenario is to have a file format that will work on both Windows and Mac OS
Hello FAT32 and exFAT!
The most commonly used format for external hard drives between Windows and Mac is FAT32, but this does come with the major drawback that the maximum file size that can be copied to the drive is 4GB. exFAT overcomes this limit with the maximum file size being 16EB (exabytes)! exFAT also has improved read and write speeds over FAT32.