Regular 2.5in drives like you find in most laptops are SATA, so ya, you can take it out and use it like a regular drive in a desktop, they are often slower though. New high end laptops have M.2 drives, either SATA or NVMe, either way, you'd need an M.2 slot on your desktop motherboard to use it on your computer. BUt ya, Laptop HDD/SSDs are usually compatible with desktop computers.