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Notes -
Sorry for the late reply.
A drive enclosure might actually solve your problem here! To be safe from weird RAID (or logical volume, I guess) issues, the trick is just that you don't want to try to mount any filesystems on the drive directly, you want to make a copy of the raw drive image, and then you can experiment with copies at leisure without risking any overeager software doing anything to screw up the original. I'd personally take the image from a system with a Linux "rescue" distribution, to avoid anything trying to be "user-friendly" by auto-mounting filesystems and auto-"repairing" anything that doesn't mount cleanly, but you could prevent such "repairs" even more surely by using an enclosure with a hardware write-protection switch.
Once you've got backups I wouldn't worry at all about the original hardware. Digital memories are irreplaceable and get more valuable with age; computer hardware depreciates fast.
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