USB Hard Drives

I have a 120gig hard drive which I put into a USB hd enclosure and it seems to cause a lot of problems.

When I have it plugged in it hangs (takes about 60 seconds) while booting up the PC. I have harddrive0 as the first boot device and cd-rom as the second. I also dont have an option for "boot from usb" in my bios.

While windows is loaded if I plug in this drive then i can access it, but if i unplug (or "safely remove it" ) I have to either A) plug it into a different USB slot (which sometimes works) or B) restart my computer again for windows xp pro sp2 to be able to recognize it.

This is terribly inconvenient.

Ive read around a bit and I know that some USB enclosures perform worse than others. Im wondering how I can fix this problem or which enclosure I can buy where I wont have to deal with this.

Thanks!

youre right I would probably get a lot better performance out of it, but heres the story on that. The desktop is about 3 years old and I just got a brand new alienware laptop. I'd like a large storage device which I could easily connect to either one with the functionability of a flash drive.