Transferring Files from a PC to my new Macbook

Hi Everyone,
I just bought a new Macbook and am waiting for it to be delivered. All I want to transfer from my old PC are my photos, videos and music files. I was using an external hard drive with my old PC, is it as easy as transferring those files I want from my PC to the external hard drive and then to the Macbook? I have been using that external hard drive to back up all the data on my PC already, will the fact that is was formatted for PC cause me any issue trying to transfer to the Macbook?
Thanks,
Ben

Well... it depends on the "format" that you used. By default, if you are using an external hard drive under Windows, it will usually format as NTFS. OS X "can" read from NTFS formatted drives, but it cannot write to NTFS drives without third party software (this is mostly due to licensing issues with Microsoft). An external drive formatted in FAT32 can be read and written to by both Windows and OS X (although FAT32 has a single file size limit of about 4GB). If you just want to read the data from your external drive, you're fine regardless of the format. If you want to be able to share the external drive between your PC and Mac (and write to the drive with both OSes), you'll need to go with FAT32 or use a 3rd party app that will let your Mac write to NTFS.

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