I don’t know where you live, just wanted to say if you’re dabbling in this new hobby, make sure they’re not keeping logs after your contract ends. Your IP of today might still be traceable back to you, if they keep the logs for a fixed time after the contract ended. Or use protection.
Not under normal circumstances. I had some issues recovering damaged harddisks that had lots of errors and retries and sometimes either the USB adapter or the mainboard SATA would crap out or handle it better. But for normal copying of HDDs, both should copy the exact same data.