On linux, I'm used to accessing e.g. HDD data through lsblk. However, sharing my WD HDD external drive with linux on my chromebook (appears under /mnt/chromeos/externals/) lsblk or lshw will not yield any results. Why is that? How does ChromeOS provide access to these external hard drives for the linux environment?

Background: The 1 TB WD HDD is most likely SATA, however, when trying to analyse it through smartctl (smartmontools), I get an "inappropriate ioctl" error when specifying "-d ata", and prior an "unable to detect device type" error when not manually specifying a type. I suspect this has to do with how chromeOS mounts the shared folders (from the chromeOS filesystem) to be accessible to linux. This question separately here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/743791/chromeos-to-linux-shared-hdd-not-recognized-device-type-for-smartctl

In sum, please be so kind and help me understand the chromeOS linux integration better. Thank you so much! :-)