Transfer Files Using SATA-USB wire?

A friend's PC crashed so I removed her hard drive and headed to Best Buy for an internal hard drive enclosure. The salesman talked me into a simple wire that connects the SATA drive via USB. The wire came with a CD with some silly dummy software, but all the instructions make it sound like the only thing I can do is clone the drive with this wire. All I want to do is recover her files (music and photos mostly) and transfer them onto an external hard drive.

Here's the product I was sold: Apricorn 2.5" SATA Notebook Drive Upgrade Kit. (Now that I write this, I'm realizing that I'm dealing with a 3.5" desktop drive) I'm on a Macbook Air with only one USB port.

Here's the question: Am I dealing with the completely wrong hardware? Should I try and return the wire even though it's open and just get an enclosure?

Sorry if this question is posted in the wrong place... I couldn't decide where to put it.

You did manage to post it in the wrong place. I moved it here for you.

Take the kit back to Best Buy and get a refund. All you need is an external carrier and a USB cable to extract the data. If you're planning on extracting it to your MBA, you'll also need a driver that can R\W NTFS (unless the drive is formatted to FAT-32).

Yep, take that one back to Best Buy.

If you're just wanting to retrieve data, you can either get an external enclosure to put the drive in - or something like this or this. Both of them will allow you to connect any bare IDE or SATA drive to your computer via USB. I have both of these and they're pretty nice kits.

You can find other brands if you want to look around Amazon, newegg, etc. Not a whole lot of difference in price though. If you have a Fry's, Microcenter or shop like that around you should be able to find one locally.

If her drive is formatted as NTFS, you should be able to read and copy the data from the drive. To write to it, I'd suggest Paragon's NTFS for Mac software.