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I recently discovered that my Sharkoon USB to SATA dock (old version, USB2) corrupts data. It happens under both Linux and Windows and seems to only depend on the disk used. All the newer HDDs I tried are affected. For all test files larger than 256 MiB (or less, don't remember exactly) the checksums were off.

Disk corruption can be hard to detect under Linux because of the disk cache. Remember to drop it before testing backups.

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You wouldn't happen to know which USB to SATA controller it is, would you? (device ID under Linux might help)

Sharkoon isn't the only one that uses those controllers (Astone might also) and I keep some of them around for testing purposes.

Before I figured out it was garbage, I bought one of the USB<->SATA+IDE dongle things I used at ex-work for use at home:

                USB to ATA/ATAPI Bridge:

                  Product ID: 0x2338
                  Vendor ID: 0x152d  (JMicron Technology Corp.)
                  Version:  1.00
                  Serial Number: 152D203380B6
                  Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
                  Manufacturer: JMicron
                  Location ID: 0x24112000 / 6
                  Current Available (mA): 500
                  Current Required (mA): 2

JMicron. Figures. You ought to put one of their SSDs in one of those adapters and have a completely broken storage system.

JMicron makes lots and lots of SATA controllers, that's a bit scary.

lsusb reports: 13fd:1240 Initio Corporation

I don't doubt it. At ex-work, I had two different USB<->SATA dongle things with two different brands of USB<->SATA controller IC inside, and both would occasionally corrupt data read from or written to the drive.

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