I've done it
I once recovered a hard drive by buying a new laptop HDD and a case that converts it to USB. I reinstalled windows on the new drive and put the old drive in the mountable usb case. I was able to grab all of the data and was a hero.
My success was so great that I purchased a device that was to let me connect and SATA or IDE drive via usb. The ext time someone brought me a dead laptop I tried to recover the data and it was a total failure. So my experience is 50/50.