Concerning a disk enclosure

I'm using a external disk enclosure to access one of my old hard drives via my laptop. When I'm not using that hard drive I want to turn it off so naturally I slide the switch from on to off. Soundwise, the hard drive then goes from vigorous spinning to stone dead. It seems about as crude as pulling the plug out of say your TV as opposed to switching it off manually. I can't find any other way of turning it off other than this on/off switch and I don't want to risk lose my data. I could well be getting in a twist over nothing but the situation is still at hand: I'm no expert on hardware. So this is where I need some valuable input.

I've never had a problem doing that to my enclosures; as long as you're not transferring data to or from it at the time, I imagine it's fine. Still, if you want to be safe, you can look down in your system tray and use the Safely Remove Hardware feature to disable the HDD before turning it off. That way there's no chance it's doing anything at all.

What sort of drive is it? I'm assuming it's a USB one, in which case, in Windows you should be able to choose "Safely remove hardware" from the appropriate icon in the system tray on the right of the taskbar. :p

This finishes all writes to the disk before reporting that it's safe to turn off/remove, since turning it off while the drive is in the middle of a write operation is likely to damage not only the date it's trying to write but also data in other locations on the disk. :p

EDIT: I should learn to type faster. :p