Do all external hard drives contain Internal hard drives w/ SATA/IDE Connectors?

[RadiatingLight]

A Friend needs to get time-sensitive stuff off of her external hard drive, and lost her power adapter. And of course these things are hard to find, so the only way to get the files will be to either order a new one, which won't come in time, or to possibly crack open the casing, and extract the drive inside. I don't want to do that unless i know for certain that it has a SATA or IDE interface inside, and not something proprietary. So: Do all external hard drives contain an internal hard drive inside (with a common standardized connector)?

[flibberdipper]

A majority of the desktop style ones seem to have standard drives, but a lot of the little portable ones have proprietary drives.

[Windows7ge]

No, I can say 2.5" WD My Passports that use micro-USB are directly attached to a PCB which is in turn directly attached to the HDD.

3.5" drives I believe are generally standard drives just with little adapters plugged into the SATA DATA/PWR ports.

[Snipergod87]

No, often 3.5" drives use SATA

but 2.5" can use SATA or have a USB 3.0 port on the circuit board of the hard drive instead of a SATA controller)

 

You could find IDE if you went back in time 10 years.

 

If you gave us the model drive we could look it up or you could.

[r4tch3t]

Based on the fact it needs a power adaptor it's most likely a 3.5" hard drive. In which case it's almost certain it's a SATA drive.

Open it up, you're very unlikely to damage it by undoing some screws (assuming it isn't welded shut)