The good news is, it's not exFAT or nothing. OK, what are my alternatives to using exFAT? And the same can be said for a Windows HD, if you only plan on connecting it to a PC, then NTFS is the way to go. However, if you plan on only using a drive on your Mac and it has MacOS High Sierra or newer installed, you'll want to stick to Apple's APFS format.
And if that's how you plan on using your drive, then you're right - exFAT is the way to go. It comes down to which OS are you going to use the drive with? WDĪccording to the list above, formatting your hard drive to exFAT so that you can read and write on either a PC or Mac seems like the obvious solution.