Any EASY, simple to use external hard drives that are PC and Mac interchangeable?

All external hard drives will do what you want. Connect your external hard drive to your dell computer and format the drive as exfat. Once formatted you can copy and write your files, pictures, etc. to or from either computer.

usable by both the Dell and the Mac concurrently,

No. Never connect an external hard drive to two computers at the same time. You could fry the interface in the hard drive and/or both computers. Connect an external hard drive to only ONE computer at a time.

If you have a network hard drive, that's different matter. But if you have a USB, FireWire or eSATA external drive, connect it to ONE and ONLY ONE computer at a time.

Almost any USB or FireWire external hard drive will work. If you want it to be interchangeable between a pc and Mac, format the drive as FAT . You can do this in Disk Utility on your Mac. Note that under FAT, there is a 4GB filesize limitation.

Alternatively, if you are using OS X 10.6.5 or higher you could use your pc to format the drive as exFAT, which doesn't have the 4GB filesize limitation.

If you mean connect the drive to two computers at the same time, no y can not use the drive concurrently. You can network the drive and use it from both your network computers.

Easiest for you I think would be to physically connect the drive to the computer you are using through the USB port. Then when you change computers that you are working on, just plug the external drive into that computers USB port. Your files will be readable and writable by both computers, though not concurrently (at the same exact time).

Tiskers wrote:

I don't know how to reformat my EHD but I am sure I can figure it out.

On Windows 7 you click on the folder looking thing in the dock, right click on the external drive (not present obviously) and choose Format > exFAT

Creates a GUID partition map automatically.

If you already have your files on the external drive, when you format it you will lose your files. So before formatting move your files off the external drive.

If you only want to store files on the external drive, it is doable and you're golden. The drive needs to have an MBR partition scheme (so Windoze sees it) and an ExFAT format so both can store files of any size. If you use FAT, you will be limited in the amount of subdirectories than can be created AND you will only be able to store files of less than 4GB in size (bummer, no Blu-Ray "backups").

If you wanted to be able to boot the Mac off the external drive, compatibility goes out the window since it would have to have a GUID partition scheme and an Apple Extended format, both of which are incomprehensible to good ole Windoze (including the candy-store flavor just out).

Edit: if you already have stuff on the drive and need to change the partitioning scheme or volume format, you need to move the stuff out beforehand. Repartitioning/reformatting will wipe the drive CLEAN.

Take a breath and relax.

Please explain in simple terms what you want to do and what equipment you have. I lost track a bit. Do you have two external drives, one new and one already containing files? Do you want to use your external drive(s) to store files from your Mac and from your Dell interchangeably?

To use an external drive for saving and reading files from both your Dell and Mac computers the external drive needs to be formatted so that both computers can read and write to it. The way to accomplish this is to format the external drive to exfat. But before formatting the drive make sure there is nothing on the drive that you want. Formatting the drive will delete everything on it. Then once the external drive is formatted you can connect it to either computer interchangeably and read/write the same files from/to the external drive regardless which computer you have it connected to.

Tiskers wrote:

Is there any EHD that is Mac AND PC compatible, right out of the box, no tricks or formatting required?

Nope.

99% of EHD's are meant for Windows and will come in NTFS. Mac don't like NTFS and won't write to it by default.

The remaining 1% work fine on Macs, but Windoze don't like GUID/HFS+ and won't read it at all.

So a reformat is definitely in your near future.

If an external hard drive is formatted as FAT or FAT32 from the box it will work on both. None I know of are formatted exfat. But as already said by ds_store, FAT has file size and number limitations. exfat does not have these limitations. Look on your box and see if the drive is formatted as fat or fat32.