If you’ve never removed a hard drive from a laptop, and the thought of doing so frightens you, relax. It’s probably much easier than you think. Typically it’s as easy as removing a screw or two and pulling out the drive. After removing the drive, you’ll likely be faced with a drive mounted in some sort of cage, which will also need to be removed. 
Budget Nerd highly recommends newegg.com for computer hardware needs, but any place you find a deal is great. At the time of posting, newegg.com offers several laptop hard drive enclosures for under $10, plus S/H. I purchased this basic laptop hard drive enclosure for $8.99, plus S/H. It has an aluminum case, USB cable, and even comes with small Phillips head screwdriver for assembly. 
Assembling the hard drive enclosure is a fairly easy task. Open up the enclosure and connect the 44 pin laptop connector to the hard drive enclosure female connectors, and then slide the hard drive into the enclosure. After tightening up the screws and connecting the USB cable, you are ready to go! 
Formatting your new drive Once your drive is in the enclosure and ready to use, you'll probably want to make sure it's cleaned up and free of any old unwanted files to give yourself maximum amount of storage space. You a format your drive through Disk Management in the Computer Management Console in Windows XP. Plug your drive into a free USB port on your PC or laptop and follow the following steps to get to Disk Management. 1. Right click on your My Computer icon on your desktop and choose "Manage," or go to "Start" > "Settings" > "Control Panel" > "Administrative Tools" > "Computer Management." 
2. Right Click on your new drive and choose format. 
3. Click "Yes" if you are sure you are ready to format. 
4. Choose a File System (NTFS is idea most cases) and give the new volume a name if you choose. You might like to call it something like "Portable Drive," or "Removeable Drive." If not, just take the defaults and click "OK." 
5. You will get one last warning that you are about to format your drive and erase all data. Click OK to proceed. When you see the process has reached 100%, you are done and you're new laptop hard drive enclosure is ready to use! 
Attach your New Hard Drive with Velcro Tape You can purchase velcro tape at Lowes, Home Depot, or pretty much any hardware store or craft stores for just a few dollars.
This allows you to more easily carry around your drive while working on a laptop, or attach it easily to your PC without fear of it being knocked off your desk and or stepped on if you set your PC on the floor. 
Total cost of project: about $15
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