Even if it's a 2½" drive you don't of course need a a USB-SATA adapter if you're prepared to poke about inside your computer and find a power plug and you have a spare SATA socket - or borrow these from another drive.

One thing I discovered recently when I updated my RaspberryPi (it's a music player) is that USB adapters usually cannot pass the full range of SATA commands to the drive. I remember reading that SMART commands may not work. So diagnostic software can discover more about a directly-connected drive than a USB-connected one.

OTOH I wouldn't just connect up a random drive inside a Windows machine. What I do is fire up a gparted live disk. If that can see the disk, but says it has no partition table (maybe it's corrupt) then an expert might be able to recover the data.