support for external USB drive enclosures?

Hey folks, asked a question a while back about determining the revision of USB ports and figured out mine are 1.1 and therefore capable of a theoretical 12MB/s. Therefore I'm considering using an external drive enclosure attached by USB to add a large storage drive to a micro-desktop I have which only can fit one drive internally. I've only used these sorts of things on OSX and Windows before, and I was wondering - does it matter what kind I buy?

I see all kinds of brands making these things when I search on various price search engines, but I'm wondering if it really matters - as long as the Linux machine "sees" a USB connection to the bridge inside the enclosure, all the translation between IDE (or SATA depending on what I get) and USB should be transparent to Linux correct? All that Linux should "see" or care about is that it's being presented with a USB mass storage device, right?

In addition to answering these questions, it would be really helpful if anyone who's done this could give me a quick overview of the proper way to partition a drive attached in such a way and create ext3 filesystem(s) on it, subsequently adding them to fstab to be remounted on boot. In previous experience I've seen USB thumb drives show up on the SCSI chain in /dev and mount that way, would this be similar?

Thanks a bunch in advance for any help!