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I have a 2 TB WD My Book Essentials external HD. The USB port is broken and is currently inside the case.

I have 3 other external drives. A 250 GB drive I've had for what seems like forever, and 2 500 GB, but I need to get new AC power adapters for them and they're full themselves. I have numerous documents, music, videos, photos and images on the 2 TB HD, so I'd like to keep them (they don't even take up a full TB).

I've thought about taking it to Geek Squad and asking them if they could place the drive in a new case/external enclosure. Nothing is wrong with the drive itself, just the usb port. I don't think it's under warranty (I bought it back in 2012) but I'm worried about the price.

I'd love to know of any other storage options aside from tubesites, the cloud, DVDs and CDs. I hate being dependent on an external HD drive, but managing a million CDs and DVDs will be torture.

Thanks in advance for any advice you guys can give.

You can move the HDD (and any of the other drives as well) to a new enclosure.  The hardest part will be removing the drive from the old enclosure.

Aside from that, the external HDD should be a BACKUP, not storage.  Install another drive into the computer (or upgrade the existing drive) and keep all of the files on the new drive.  Then use the external drive to keep a copy (ie: BACKUP) of all the files in case the primary storage fails.  If you don't have a backup, you are risking data loss.  And external drives is less reliable than internal drives.

Storage types:  cloud, CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, HDD

HDD is the fastest and cheapest.

A saw a couple of WD externenal USB drives which come in a sealed plastic case. Does someone know (for having opened such drive) if:

1) the drives insides are standard SATA drives
2) the drives are managed in a standard (i.e. non-proprietary) way which allows to remove the HDD and connect it using a SATA cable or a SATA/USB adapter (of course power is needed too, either from a small power adapter with SATA power cable (or Molex-SATA adapter) or from the PC PSU).

In case of older IDE drives I believe it's better to use IDE/USB adapters than IDE/SATA adapters which are more likely to cause problems. Don't know how well IDE PCI interface boards work. Best is copy content of old drives to new drives but be aware that some operating systems (OS) can mess up file permissions which can make it impossible to use the disk with its original OS or together with the OS it was originally used even if not the system disk itself.

Personally I would never ever rely on cloud storage because online security is merely a myth, at leas IMO.

generally yes, the drives are managed in a standard way, you don't have trouble get it in a new enclosure/adapter (sometimes you have to break the case though). only with the newer, USB 3.0 capable 2,5" (small) drives do you get problems: the controller is soldered on the drive, that is a pain in the ass

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