Copy files from a working hard drive to a new one

Hi,

My cpu and motherboard broke on me and now i have a new one with a new hard drive as well
and i wanted to ask if its possible to hook up the old hard drive, wich is the same OS (windows 7), to my computer and be able to copy and paste the files to my new hard drive? (just like usb external hard drives do)
or do i need to do a whole procedure before i am able to do that?
hard drives are SATA

thanks in advance