I think this depends on whether it’s a 3.5 or 2.5 inch drive inside. To my knowledge, all external drives with a 3.5 inch drive inside are shuckable and have a standard SATA interface. With the compact drives that have a 2.5 inch drive inside, many will have a native usb interface and no SATA connector.

It makes sense as 3.5" sata drives are used for many many applications so why make something new just for external drives? With 2.5, however there are very few devices that use spinning sata drives in this form factor. It makes a lot more sense to build the USB interface directly on the drive since their main and possibly only application is external drives.

I could be wrong, but this has been my experience.

The article implies that current patients essentially have no choice but to continue storing whatever frozen embryos they have at the cost of hundreds of dollars per year. It also mentioned that fertility clinics have “paused” services due to the legal risk posed to anyone involved if the embryo were to fail at any stage. So what happens now? Will these clinics be legally obligated to continue maintaining these embryos in their frozen state until the end of time? Considering their business model has been made illegal, it seems like bankruptcy is inevitable. Who then becomes responsible for these embryos? This is all so absurd.