I want to buy a hard drive enclosure (for a 3.5 inch hard drive). This will serve 2 purposes and I'd like to choose one that's easy to install (read - idiot proof) and uninstall, and reliable. I'm not sure exactly what features to look for.

Here's what I need to do. I had put a 1.5 TB second internal hard drive in my computer a year ago. That hard drive is failing. It's under warranty so I will call Western Digital to look into a replacement. In the meantime, a Dell technician took it out of my computer for me (he was sent by Dell when we thought it was the original hard drive that was failing - once the tech was here and we discovered it was this second hard drive that was failing, he was nice enough to take it out of the computer for me and put in my new 2TB hard drive.

This 1.5 TB hard drive has some videos I'd like to try and recover. Other than these videos, I think I have copies of everything else that would have been on there (although I would like to check that as well). So the first thing I want is to put this 1.5TB hard drive in an enclosure so I can connect it to my pc and see if I can transfer/save the videos that are on it.

Then - once WD sends me a replacement 1.5 TB drive, I'd like to install it in my computer to replace the original 500GB hard drive. I want to use the new, fast WD black caviar 2TB drive as my main boot drive - and will use the 1.5 for back up and storage (yes, I know that ordinarily the larger drive would be for back up, storage - but in this case the new 2tb drive is fast - and the 1.5 drive is a green caviar drive (and will therefore be slower and more suited for backup). Is that thinking right?

Once the 2TB drive is set up as the main boot drive (primary) and the newly replaced 1.5TB drive is the second internal hard drive, that will leave me with the original 500GB hard drive - and no enclosure. So I thought I'd enclose it and use it as an external hard drive for my daughter's computer. (Is there any reason I should be scared to wipe that drive clean? I will have copied everything to the 2TB drive - and also have a clone of the hard drive I made in Dec. 2010.

I have USB and SATA ports in my computer (my daughter just has USB). I'm thinking of getting a fairly inexpensive hard drive enclosure with USB and SATA ports. This one at Dell is $42:

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&sku=A1497051&baynote_bnrank=0amp;baynote_irrank=0amp;~ck=baynoteSearch

Is this a reasonable one? Can I do better. Any other features I should look for?

Thank you.

Lynn.

PS - if I"m going about how to use these various drives all wrong, please let me know.