Tips for using an older Hard Drive with an enclosure

Hello,
I have a two-parter in regards to an external hard drive. I want to be able to use an older hard drive off one of my PCs for an external hard drive through an enclosure.
Question 1:
Before I purchase the enclosure I was wondering if any USB enclosure will work with the MacBook or if there are specifics I need to have on the enclosure in order for it to work.
Question 2:
The hard drive is from a used (3-4yr old) PC. The hard drive is fine but the old computer is dead (video card). Will I be able to pull off data from it once I get an enclosure? For example, my itunes reside on this hard drive can I export those to the macbook?
Anything else I need to know to make this work?
Thanks!!

How do I know what type of hard drive it is (ATA or SATA)? If I pop out the hard drive from the PC will it say on it someplace? (sad question I know).
There drive may say on it, but if not it should be identification or a model number on the drive you can look up. SATA drives usually also only have a very small connector for both data and power whereas ATA drives have a longer connector and a much wider data cable. You can see a drawing of the ATA connector on this web page:
http://en.kioskea.net/contents/pc/ide-ata.php3
So once I pull all the data off I am interested in - can I then somehow reformate the drive so that I can use it to read/write to from the macbook?
Yep. Use Disk Utility (it's in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder in Mac OS X) to erase the drive. If you'll only be using it with a Mac, choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) in the formatting option. If you want to be able to use the drive with both Windows and Mac systems, choose MS-DOS.
Message was edited by: Dave Sawyer

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