Even cheaper and easier:
Get a 3.5" to 2.5" IDE adapter. Most are straight IDE so you may need to cut or bend a pin to convert it to EIDE, but that's simple.
I have two of these adapters and I use them all the time for disk imaging and for recovering data from customer laptops (usually walk-in customers who were too cheap to buy antivirus software for their computers and used MSIE rather than Firefox).
Note: this introduces a couple of advantages (quite a few actually):
- Access the drive as a native ATA device
- Lower CPU utilization than USB
- no futzing with flaky USB support
- faster transfer rates