It depends on what you are doing.The cyclic redundancy check will only detect an error, while thehamming code can also correct many types of errors. However toperform this correction the extra error detection parity bitsrequired in hamming code are many more than the bits needed forcyclic redundancy check, per data byte being checked.Normally cyclic redundancy check is done on large block of datathat can be resent or retried to get the correct block of data(e.g. telecommunication channels, disk sectors).Normally hamming code is done on individual bytes or words ofcomputer memory.