Lightroom 5.7 - Corrupt on Import

So I have been importing photos from my cards into Lightroom for a while now and I have never had any issues. Today I imported 141 pictures from this weekend and 10 of the DNGs were corrupted. The CR2s on the card and in the backup location were both fine. Now, it wasn't anything more than a hassle to delete them and reimport them, but I am wondering if this isn't a symptom of a larger issue...

Thoughts?

It could just be a one off freak incident caused by an improperly seated card reader plug or a random memory glitch caused by cosmic radiation. Or it could be a symptom of something becoming corrupted, such as the driver files for the card reader or some OS files used when reading/writing files. Alternatively it may be a symptom of a failing card reader (cable, plug etc) or even imminent hard drive failure.

The one thing it almost certainly isn't caused by is Lightroom as LR has nothing to do with the copying of files. When you import images into LR it makes a request to your OS and your OS reads the files and writes them to the new location. Problems will occur if you have corrupted OS files or there are problems with the drive being written to. Finding out which it is can be problematic because a fault may be localised on a drive and it is hard/impossible to test that specific area.

Thanks... I do understand the variability of things, but I was mainly looking for possible experiences. Based off your response, I have some things I can look into...

Thanks again!

I'm hoping this is not the case but I was dealing with the exact same symptoms. It started to happen more frequently and ended up with crashes of LR and OS X. Turned out to be a RAM hardware issue. Good luck

Thanks for the tip...

There are a lot of 3rd party utilities, free ones, that will torture test as much of your RAM as the operating system will allow, most exhaustively than startup parity tests. These can be helpful for diagnosing issues like this, to help narrow it down between RAM, hard drive/SSD, or connection issues.