first off, if you plan to scan the storage for bad "sectors", that's gonna take eons if the disk is of any considerable size. what's more likely is you running the SMART self-test and that will work over any medium.
the cables absolutely can and do cause corruption, whether it's plain SATA-SATA cables or the USB-SATA with their own controller on it; however, if you don't have reason to suspect this particular cable/adapter is faulty, it's not a worry vector per se.
thinkpads are interesting because they are heavy-duty machines that can be had for cheap on the used market. they are cheap because businesses buy them by the truckload and then offload them after three+ years and switch to Newest & Best. flooded market plus a buncha older models still around from earlier floods plus civilians selling their shit -> low price, otherwise nobody would buy them.
if you haven't got access to such a market, either by being around where they're being dumped directly or by having local businesses importing them in bulk and reselling them locally, then you should look elsewhere for value, as they're only interesting if they can be had for cheap.
e.g. you have similar options from hp (elitebook) and dell (latitude), they are also business-class laptops with durability and serviceability in mind, perhaps you can find those locally.
as an aside, you should skip all AMD platforms up until 5000 series; many issues (power management, GPU performance, etc.) especially if you're going to run linux.