Is there anything wrong with taking my ssd with mint out of my desktop and slapping it in an old laptop? I actually tried it and it seems to have booted up perfectly. How does it know what drivers to use automatically? Its pretty sweet that it works this easily.
When you boot the computer, each device identifies itself to the OS using a combination of a vendor code and a device code. In Terminal, try the following two commands:
lspci lsusb