External hard drive

[#1]

Looking at external hard drives for windows and mac computers the latter appear to cost more.
Are drives for mac computers more reliable or exactly the same as for windows, if so why the price difference ?

[#2]

only difference might be is that the mac ones have thunderbolt or firewire..I've got plenty of non-mac specific usb ones and they work fine.

[#3]

Surely an external HDD can be formatted for any particular OS.
I dual-boot Windows and Linux, and my external drive has two partitions, one formatted for Windows filesystem and the other for Linux.
Cannot the same be done for Mac?

[#4]

Presumably a mac can have a USB external drive plugged in?
I have such an external drive for Windows/Linux backups; it has one small normal partition
and one LVM partition (presently containing 20 logical volumes).