I'm about to take the plunge into a macbook pro. Currently I have all my photos, movies, etc stored on an external hard drive. What do I need to do to make everything compatible with the mac?

 

Your new Macbook can read the external hard drive but not write to it. That is, no problem to copy your data to the new computer.
If you what to continue use the hard drive with the Mac I suggest you format it once you transferred ALL of your data to the Mac. You can either use HSF+ or exFAT depending if you going to use the disk in a Mac only environment or mixed with Windows computers. Remember all data on the disk will be lost when you formatting the drive.

 

Correct, so save your external HD's data to your computer, format the external HD using the Disk Utility program, then transfer that data back to your hard drive. Now you've got all your data and a working read/write external HD for your new MBP. Enjoy.

 

Thanks Guys, which format do I use if it'll need to be used in a Mac/Windows environment?

 

Eventually you will end up getting parallels esp if you use the mb for work. Then you will use both formats.

 

exFAT if the computers are fairly new. Otherwise FAT32. FAT32 can't handle files larger than 4GB.

 

Nothing, I use both , initial format FAT32 is the issue as you can only delete and move on/off the drive in that format. You can view and play it perfectly otherwise.

 

Correct needs to be re-formated to MAC first , if he uses it other way it will work but issues I point out will exist, ask me how I know

 

You could also keep it NTFS (provided it is formatted NTFS to begin with) and use one of these utilities to write to NTFS from the mac:

Tuxera NTFS for Mac | Tuxera
Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X software

I use MacFUSE with NTFS-3G, though it is older and unsupported currently.

 

how big a file can exfat handle? our other computers are running XP and newer