Just a bit of a follow-up because it’s a bit of hardware troubleshooting you don’t really see many people talking about. At the start of the year I made this thread about a potentially bad SSD: Potentially bad SSD(s) troubleshooting
Well the tl;dr is that there is actually nothing wrong with either SSD. I thought it was weird that the controller in both SSDs had failed simultaneously, well it was the power supply at fault. I’d been having general system instability when gaming where I was having system crashes that sometimes felt like a CPU-OC kernel panic… except sometimes it didn’t. If I had Amarok playing in the background, it would sometimes continue playing as normal after the system had apparently shut off, sometimes in-game audio would continue. Underclocking the CPU made the crashes less frequent, but not completely gone. The thing is I’ve never actually overclocked a system running Linux so I don’t actually have any experience of what it looks like when you have an unstable overclock when you don’t have the Windows bluescreen lol. The only thing that really pushed me towards the PSU was when I played Split Fiction with my partner that game, and that game alone, would have a very unambiguous PSU power off. As in power would go off, with that distinctive click, I would need to flip the switch on the PSU off and on again in order to boot.
Anyway I replaced the power supply yesterday, returned the CPU to its default clock, put my nvme drives back in my BTRFS array, have tested gaming at length and all of the CPU and SSD issues suddenly aren’t happening anymore.
The only reason I’m following up here is because it didn’t register to myself or anyone else in that thread that the PSU could potentially be at fault. It’s not an easy thing to troubleshoot, and unless it actually goes POP a bad PSU can cause a whole range of very odd and individually inexplicable issues and that’s worth a reminder 