I bought a smaller laptop, because my first laptop is too large to fit my locker at work. I plan to share one hard drive between them, moving it to the smaller laptop when I use it. (I'm aware of other options such as keeping separate hard drives, but have chosen the simplicity of swapping the one hard drive between the computers, because keeping two sets of the same files synced was messy.)

As far as I know, if I suspend-to-disk on one laptop, I can't expect the hard drive to properly resume from hibernation on the other laptop, because it's not the same model and Linux will certainly detect that the hardware suddenly changed. Is there any way I can get around that, or do I have to just settle for shutting down normally before I move the hard drive?

The safest way that I know of is a complete shutdown.

Suspending could make a mess of things and possibly lock up the HDD if it doesn't resume properly like you said.

Is this an external HDD?

Yeah i think it will go crazy because of hardware.

But why do you want to swap hard disks and mess around with that all the time.

I thought usb keys or something like dropbox can adress those issues.

Office 365 is especially good for documents.

Another option might be to get a nice external USB drive and use that for your portable files. In a similar situation, that would me my choice.

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It's an internal hard drive. And an external device is impractical here, because I'm taking the smaller laptop on my bus commute to work.