anyone ever taken an external HD apart and used it like a regular hardrive?

I'm not tlaking about the build your own hard drivs that obviously you can do that. But what about the other ones?

Because ---
My external (acomdata) has been working for me for a long time and its been through some tough times. A fair amount of shock, and now its essentially stopped working. It will still turn on and the fan works, and even the computer knows when its on or off (the litle ding noise goes on/off when it is turned on/off) BUT the harddrive makes a funny noise when its on and nothing will show up on the computer. I need to get a new external anyway so what i'm wondering is if i can take it apart and plug the hard drive directly into my computer using ribbons. Does anyone know if i can do this? Because i'm sure the actual hard drive is fine. They are extremely tough. If you know anything about this, that would be greatly appreciated. thank you.

I realize i may have put this in the wrong place... Sorry about that if you like I'll delete it.

Yes will work no problem. Just pull it out of the caddy and place into pc like a normal drive 3.5 drive

Yeah, I've done this plenty of times (and the other way around too). However if it's making funny noises it's far more likely that the actual drive has failed rather than the interface, so it may not help.

Oh okay. Thanks for the replies.

You could just find a different 3.5" drive and put it in the external housing. I've done that, and it works great as an upgrade.

I've used the 2.5" drive from a LaCie Porshe 60GB to replace the failing drive in my sisters laptop. Seems to work fine.

Kinda, my dvd burner started off as an external and now its an internal.  The biggest question I would have is the connection interally.  However, if you can put it back together take it apart for there is no greater way to learn.  One note, I tend to take things a little far for example I am using a fish pump to cool the cpu.