Recovering data from a damaged hard disk

Hi group, My laptop hard disk was damaged, a company technician told me that I still can recover some information from the disk using a USB SATA connection. I have purchased a new hard drive and now my laptop is running fine again, so I think that I can try connecting the USB-SATA to my laptop, and with the suitable software I can try. could anybody help me about some software to use? Esteban