Installing Standard Windows on an SSD via USB (not Windows To Go)

I'm prepping my old laptop for eBay, and I removed the old drive inside with all my data so it can't possibly be recovered by someone else. Of course, this means I need to replace the storage with something, and I happen to have a spare SATA SSD around I got for free, never wrote to it. The only problem is that my laptop does not have any SATA cable or hardware inside, and my attempt to install a basic SATA cable (with the same number of pins as the motherboard) resulted in what I think was a short (PC turned off immediately after putting the cable in), so I think I might have borked the inter

Question by TechKnight25 on Super User, licensed CC BY-SA. We show a short excerpt and link to the original thread as credit.