Here we report on a detailed investigation on NdBa 2 Cu 3 O 7− δ (Nd123) crack generation achieved by an extensive morphological and structural study on 1 cm diameter top-seeded melt-textured grown pellets, where crack development stops at an earlier stage, and on the parallelepiped fragments resulting from the spontaneous breaking of larger (3 and 5 cm diameter) pellets. In this way complementary information on the process is obtained.