Need external hard drive help

I am going to be getting a refurbished white Macbook sometime this week . This will be my first Mac. Everyone else in my family uses PCs and we would like to be able to share a backup hard drive. I need to know if I could partition a 500GB western digital hard drive with HFS or HFS+ and NTFS so that I could have my backup on one partition and the PCs could have a backup on another partition. If my mac were to crash, all I need to be able to do is get the files back on my computer (once it would be repaired) or another computer. I just need to backup things like pictures, music and documents.