How can I tell a USB external hard drive is IDE or SATA without disassembling the enclosure?

[pdlm]

Hi,

I have a few 600GB USB external hard drives laying around. Now I need an internal hard drive for a Linux installation. My MB only takes SATA. How can I tell the external hard drive is IDE or SATA without disassembling the enclosure?

 

[Alabalcho]

With that capacity, it's most probably SATA. But - why so hesitant to open them, usually it's couple of screws.

Connect that drive to Windows, go to Device Manager, there you'll see drive type alongside USB-<interface> controller

 

[SSerbana]

Control panel-Device Manager-Disk drives you can see all you HDDs. Google the model and get the specs