[PLUG] External USB 2.0 hard drives

[Michael M.]

I want to get an external USB 2.0 hard drive in the vicinity of 300GB.  
Newegg has a nice-looking simple 320GB model from the WD "essential" 
series that does just USB 2.0 and doesn't come with (useless for 
non-Windows/OSX) back-up software, yet I still can't find anything 
"official" saying, yes, this drive should work fine with Linux operating 
systems.  I'm 99% sure it should be fine, because it seems to lack 
proprietary gotchas, but I thought I'd ask in case there is some 
glaringly obvious warning sigh I'm missing?

The WD drive I'm interested in is here:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=166&language=en

The Newegg.com listing for the drive is here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136001

I can understand any hardware manufacturers not wanting to make it sound 
like they will support 200 different Linux distros, but honestly how 
difficult would it be for them to include a brief footnote that a 
particular piece of equipment should work without problems on any Linux 
OS with USB support?  It's frustrating that so often they won't even 
provide that kind of basic information.  It's when I see "Supported 
Operation Sytems: Window blah blah Macintosh blah" and no Linux that I 
have niggling doubts.  It's yet another factor that slows Linux adoption 
because it's another case of expecting Linux users to be able to read 
between the lines and "understand" that, yeah, this is fine despite the 
refusal to spell that out, or no, this will be a problem because of x y 
or z.

Of course, if anyone knows of a vastly superior drive at a similar price 
point, feel free to chime in!

-- 
Michael M. ++ Portland, OR ++ USA
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." --S. Jackson