It's not going to be a lot different, no. Some of the details around mounting the drive may be slightly different, but only slightly, and samba's going to be the same whichever *nix you use.
For extra credit you could investigate running minidlna on it to expose your media to things like smart-tvs and playstations.
--edit--
On the external drives thing, most USB drive enclosures should just work (tm) with linux these days, however there used to be problems surrounding power-saving. This is due to them being designed around the way windows uses external enclosures, and linux not waking them the same way, or not realising they had gone to sleep or something, and many disk enclosures I used with older ARM debian boxes (4+ years back) had a habit of going to sleep and not waking up.
tl;dr - YMMV, best to stick to one that is known-good.
For extra credit you could investigate running minidlna on it to expose your media to things like smart-tvs and playstations.
--edit-- On the external drives thing, most USB drive enclosures should just work (tm) with linux these days, however there used to be problems surrounding power-saving. This is due to them being designed around the way windows uses external enclosures, and linux not waking them the same way, or not realising they had gone to sleep or something, and many disk enclosures I used with older ARM debian boxes (4+ years back) had a habit of going to sleep and not waking up.
tl;dr - YMMV, best to stick to one that is known-good.