I usually pick my own hard drives and get a cheap external enclosure to go with it. The pre-packaged HDs are usually not the best.

Just about everything understands FAT32/exFAT (it's what is used for USB flash drives) - that's the most compatible format, but has no fault tolerance, etc.

You could just attach it to some master computer, format it as you like, then share it over the network. That would save you having to think about how to format it. As long as all the PCs can see network drives, you're golden.

I dunno how friendly Chromebooks are to storage on the network. I haven't tried that bit myself, but apparently it can be done.

It looks like Chromebooks can access lots of directly attached file systems also, too. But note that HFS+ is read-only on journaled systems.

MacOS can write to NTFS with a little work - dunno how robust that is.

If RW support is robust enough on MacOS, NTFS might be the best choice if you don't want to do the network sharing route.

HTH a little. Good luck!

Cheers,
Scott.