Prepare an external USB harddisk for use in both Windows and Mac environemnt

I have a 700Gb USB3 external harddisk, and I want to use it with both Windows 8.1 (on my home desktop PC) and MacOSX 10.10 (at home with MacMini 2012 Server and office with mac).  It tooks me a while this morning (almost 1.5 hour) but I finally got it working.  Here's some tidbit I found out.

Disk Partition structure

In order to flexily create, remove, shrink partition, I need to use Basic GPT instead of MDB.  Even with Basic GPT, there are still things that I can't do on certain tool in certain environment.  But after compared both, I still found Basic GPT gives me more advantage.

Tool(s) to create disk partition

• Do not use Disk Director 12 to create partition.  I used it to create Basic GPT to create the basic partition structure and it seems fine.  But no matter what partition I created on DD12 at Windows side, the Mac side can't seemed to properly recognize, or sometimes treated it as corrupted.  At first I thought I could use DD12 to shrink and enlarge partition, but since whatever it touches seemed to upset the Mac side, I think I may as well just stop using this software.
• Using Windows system Disk manager tool to create partition seemed to work but only to a point.  There were still partitions created that way and NOT properly recognized by Mac.
• The best way, after all these trial and error, is to use Mac Disk Utility to create and partitions that can be recognized by both Mac and Windows.  Sure it may create some little gap (like tens of Megabyte being wasted in partition gaps), but still better than things not working.

Partition Format

For Mac OS partition, I have no choice but choose MacOS Journal format.  The question is what Windows format I should use.  After trial and error, I found that the best way is to create the exFAT using Mac Disk Utility.  That allows both environment to see those partitions properly, and also allow me to put file in that same exFAT partition from both Mac and Windows world.