What is the best format to format an external hard drive to?

I want to read and right on a mac of course but I would love to be able to transfer files from my PC to Mac.
Is this at all possible?

In addition to what Matt Clifton said, I'd add the following:
If you network your computers, you can format the external in FAT32, NTFS, or the Mac's HFS and both Windows-based PCs and Macs will be able to read and write to the external drive.
I have a network of 5 Macs and two Dell PCs networked---the Dell has an external drive formatted in NTFS, each of the Macs have one external drive formatted in HFS, and then I have one large external drive connected to the Airport Extreme as a true network drive formatted in HFS. Each computer, Mac or Dell, can access any of the other computers and external drives and read and write to them all. The reason is that over a network, the SMB network protocol translates everything automatically and in the background so you can read and write to any network connected drive and computer---Windows or Mac.
So, I would format your external in HFS to be able to take advantage of the fact that there is essentially no limit on file size as there is for FAT32. Makes a difference if you are working with video files. FAT32 has a file size limit of 4 GB.

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