The rule of thumb generally - at least for desktop Macs - is if the drive is Apple-branded, then it can handle variable speed and GCR encoding, which are the requirements for 800K and 400K disks.
As far as file system handling, there are limitations when dealing with 400K disks (which are MFS file system rather than HFS) depending on the version of MacOS. IIRC, Mac OS 8 was the dividing line there, System 7.x or lower can deal with 400K disks natively. But in any case, if you're dealing with disk images only that doesn't matter. The drive will read or write images fine and the data won't be otherwise affected unless a disk is mounted in the Finder.
As far as file system handling, there are limitations when dealing with 400K disks (which are MFS file system rather than HFS) depending on the version of MacOS. IIRC, Mac OS 8 was the dividing line there, System 7.x or lower can deal with 400K disks natively. But in any case, if you're dealing with disk images only that doesn't matter. The drive will read or write images fine and the data won't be otherwise affected unless a disk is mounted in the Finder.