Mint and USB compatibility

[evereti]

Hi

Feel like an idiot asking this question but here goes.

I am a long time Windows user and pretty tech savvy but I am very new to Linux. I have played around with Mint/Cinnamon on a LiveCD and would like to instal it on a more permanent basis, ie an external USB Hard Drive.

I have a spare 80gb 2.5" sata drive and am looking at EvilBay for external enclosures to put it in. They pretty well all say compatible with all windows editions, some even say MacOS, but none say Linux or any other Unix.

Q. Is this just laziness on the part of the vendor or is there some compatibility with Linux and Mint that a Linux Newbie like me is unaware???

Or does Linux recognise any Sata external drive just like Windoze.

Thanks

[eanfrid]

Q. Is this just laziness on the part of the vendor

Yes. They don't even know that Linux exists at all sometimes.

[lightelf]

I have used several HD enclosures with Mint and they all looked like a mass storage device and funnctioned quite normally from the file manager. You might want to read about using FAT versus ext3 or 4 (Linux)if you are setting up / formatting a drive. I found a Vantech 2.5 enclosure on Amazon for seven bucks and it works great, easy to assemble....though the first one I had to send back because it had solder flux & globs on the connector board! Good luck.