Corruption archiving .rar files to external drives

I'm having an issue that's baffling me and I'm hoping somebody can shed some light on this.

I'm in the process of archiving some of my larger files into .rar archives on some external hard drive enclosures using winrar. I rar the files directly from an internal HDD to an external drive via USB 3.0. I'm using a Renesas internal 3.0 add-on card with 4 USB 3.0 ports. The external enclosures are Icy Dock 4-bay enclosures.

Here's the issue - winrar completes the operation as if there's no problem, but when I test the archive immediately afterwards it fails and says corrupt volume. I test using both winrar and 7-zip. Both fail. I never used to have this issue until a few weeks ago when it first started happening. Even weirder - If I archive the files to my other internal drive first, and then copy those .rar files over to the external drive, they test okay. It only gets corrupted if I archive them directly to the external drive. This only started happening recently - I have always archived directly to the external enclosures previously with the same drives and same external enclosures without issue. This happens with both Icy Dock enclosures with several different hard drives.

I've tried swapping USB cables and even different USB 3 ports on my internal card. Sometimes I get corruption and sometimes I don't. I just tried 20 minutes ago and the winrar archive failed - then I tried zipping them directly with 7-zip and they didn't fail - then I tried again with winrar and this time it didn't fail. I have no idea what's going on. Any ideas would be appreciated since I don't know where to begin troubleshooting this.

Have you tried transferring the files without Zip or Rar?

Dumb question - why do you rar the files.

tgfyhre said:

whs said:

Dumb question - why do you rar the files.

Lol, does it matter? The point is they are getting corrupted so something is going wrong.

Which answers why I rar them up. I've always been a bit paranoid as far as file integrity goes (read too many tales of bit-rot and HDD corruption). I like to keep them archived and I also create par2 recovery files. I feel a bit safer that way knowing I can always run repairs if needed years from now.

OK, I get you.

Silly me thought that the less one does to a file the less chance of corruption.
I personally don't move much so I never thought of Rar or Zip to move files.
I didn't know that Rar or Zip files were safer compared to just moving files as they are.

You could try moving some sample files with out Rar or Zip to your external drives for a test. It might isolate the problem a little.

I will just watch the thread and learn.

A typical Jack. Layback as usual.

tgfyhre seem to know what he/she wants and I don't know how to get he/she there.
So I will just Layback and watch. If things go well I will learn something.