I wanted to know if anyone has any suggestions on what challenges there might be when buying an external IDE drive enclosure for a hard drive or cd writer. Being able to move these storage devices around easily is important to me so maybe this is not the best way, however i would be open to other suggestions.

From the google searches I have done it seems that I would need to enable scsi support and then USB mass storage support? I might be way off on that, however thats the impression I get from my research. Also if there are any links to articles about this very thing anyone could provide, I would appreciate it. Thanks.

I'm using one of those things in which I put in a laptop hd. It works just fine - and it's also good for carrying with me since laptop drives are quite robust. If you're using Slackware9.1. it should get recognized once you plug it in - that's what happens for me. Basically, what you need is usb-storage and scsi support compiled as modules which usually is the case by default. You still have to mount the partitions on the external drive once it is found.