Can a USB/IDE/SATA adapter be flaky?

"Yes, many types of converters can be very flakey. The cheap ones can almost guarantee problems eventually. Make sure you have a clean solid connection with the drive connected. If you are using the USB ones, that is a shared bus on the computer. USB can be quick one day and slow the next depending on what’s going on.

I find for short transfers, those adapters work fine, but if I am going to copy a whole hard drive, I would much rather use an external enclosure for the hard drive or connect it natively up to the computer (SATA drives have made this simple now). Data corruption can be very frustrating."

"every piece of equipment can 'be flaky' (remember Gremlins? great movie :).

but it is too early for a final verdict, run more tests/comparisons with different drives and if possible on different computers."