File errors PC and Mac disks

kartracer

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I've been backing up (copying) some photo files across external disks from PC and, mainly, Mac. When I checked some of the file contents, some of the images have a horizontal line (like a scratch) across, and others have a moire-like pattern, or colour distortions.

Its not all the files, but enough to make me concerned about what is happening. Luckily, I have multiple copies of the images. Any idea what is going on here? All disks are new/recent.
 
Sounds like data corruption

agreed
i have a 1tb drive that on read/writes 4gig files or smaller is fine but reading or writing larger files 8gig for instance will glitch the drive
the only reason i can think this is happening is the drive is overheating in one way or another or not correctly thermally calibrating on the fly

the drive is scrap things will only get worse no point in risking data
 
Best thing to do first would be to run a hard disk diagnostics tool, such as MHDD. This should show up any problems with the drive, which is likely to be the problem (but not necessarily).
 
If the disks are fairly new, check with the manufacturer, most disks have a few years warranty, so you should be able to get a new disk if it is faulty.
 
Its been an occasional problem. I am using Mac to NTFS read/write software, but have not had any obvious problems until recently. Trying to pin it down... In any event, I'm going to switch from an external USB caddy to an internal hot swap bay, as this will speed things up also.
 
I have had data corruption via USB before. Turned out it was a hardware issue (chipset/driver - not sure what) and adding a USB card into the PC sorted it. If it is common with the enclosure, I'd suspect the chipset in the enclosure.

If you are getting corruption on both PC & Mac, try downloading teracopy for the PC. This has a checksum option which allows you to check that the source and destination files are identical. It was this program that allowed me to finally figure out it was the PC hardware, not the device I was copying to that was at fault.
 
id bin off the 3rd party software, OSX can do native NTFS read/write with a few terminal commands.
I'd eliminate the enclosure first - if corruption only happens on the Mac, then look at s/w issues, but make sure you are 100% happy with the enclosure first IMHO.
 
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