The issue with flaky bridge chips wasn't usually about data integrity——it works fine most of the time, i.e. data written got read back correctly.
But often after extensive use, `dmesg` would complain about problems when talking to the drives, e.g. drive not responding or other strange error messages (forgot the exact text but very irritating and google-fu didn't help). There were also problems with SMART commands passthrough and drive power management e.g. sleep/standby adjustment which wasn't reliable when talking via bridge chips.
I use only disks directly connected to SATA controllers afterwards and no such issues ever happened again.