In the prehistoric days of 1600bpi 9 track tape drives we actually trusted the crc-16 enough to reconstruct single bit errors in data blocks. So whoever came up with the standard for these drives must have trusted it immensely. Sorry, this is not absolute, but those tape drives did, in those days, hold all banking information more than a few days old (disk space was VERY expensive)so the reliability must have been very good.

Erik