I don’t touch the drive for years on end and it works. The connections are IDE and Molex. I have an IDE to USB data cable and a Molex power cable. I can plug it into my PC that I just built a few months ago no problem.

The data on “old” style disk drives is physically etched upon the disk magnetically. That’s why the data still exists, despite sitting unused for long periods of time.

Neither you nor the OP know much about this topic.