Do all external hard drives work with my macbook pro?

I just bought an HP Simplesave external hard drive. On the rear of the package, I noticed its compatible with XP, Vista, and 7, but nothing about Mac. I don't want to open it, but I was under the assumption that all external hard drives work on all systems. I didn't think they were operating system specific.
Anyone know about this specific hard drive, and about hard drives in general if my assumption is correct?

The drive should work fine once you've reformatted it for the Mac, but whatever small portion of the purchase price went to cover the included software will be wasted, because HP will only have included Windoze software with it. And in the unlikely event that you ever need to call HP tech support, they'll be clueless about anything involving a Mac. These are the two reason why DP suggests avoiding drives whose makers don't mention anything about use with Macs.

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