Hi,
last year, I built my first own PC, containing among other things both the hard drive of my prematurely deceased HP laptop and a shiny new SSD - Crucial BX100, 250 GB. Things were nice, and instead of overheating from not even moderately demanding tasks, I could suddenly play Witcher 3 on high settings for hours and hours. I changed OS 2-3 times in the first few months, then stuck to Windows 7 for about half a year until one fateful day early this year, my system suddenly froze on me out of nowhere, I had a single-tab firefox open, basically. NTFS was corrupt, but I managed to get back into my system -somehow-, it didn't perform very well anymore though and later froze again. No errors shown in Eventviewer, but because of a fairly recent NVIDIA driver upgrade, I blamed it on that initially.
Fairly clueless, I kept changing things and hopping around different OSes, hoping something I did would bring salvation - and no matter what I installed, after a few hours, days or maybe 2 weeks at most, it would freeze, sometimes be rebootable, sometimes have a corrupted file system. Never got a single error in any logs, only after freezes/crashes from problems caused by these. Eventually, took me far longer than it should have, the devious culprit was found in my beloved SSD - not just improperly plugged but actually broken - after taking it out, I was able to run an OS (Windows 7, again, somehow) using just the HDD (which is a bit over 2.5 years old right now)... for maybe two months, then it also started doing weird stuff - being sluggish, having absurdly high disk utilization on an idle OS, becoming unreadable while active... my last install, a Debian LXDE which I just spent a good 2 painful days installing because first I had a bad ISO and then it took me a few attempts to realize I have to use the nvidia-backports driver rather than the regular one, suddenly just went "read only file system" on me after the terminal finally opened after 2-3 minutes of being stuck. Didn't even get to install iotop anymore, system is dead. It had already been notably slow on package installations before.
Surely I can't have 3 drives (my remaining laptop's HDD also failed this year, but at 9 years old...) failing within such short succession after not having a single issue in my 15 or so years of using computers before? I used Crystal Disk Info on both disks multiple times a while ago (before the HDD also started giving trouble), all green. The old drive (which was just reeeaaally slow, but not crashing or freezing) I updated my UEFI firmware rather late, but even after that it didn't change anything (I even plugged in my SSD - just the SSD - again and installed Mint, lasted a day...). Surely it has to be something else - my mainboard, my power supply, something?
Or am I that unlucky and a victim of gambler's fallacy here? Either way, it has turned from a troubleshooting challenge that I didn't even resent that much into pure frustration - if it hadn't been expensive for my standards, I would gladly throw my PC right into the trashcan at this point.
So how to be sure here? The obvious idea would be to plug one of these drives into my ancient but trusty surviving laptop, install something and see what happens, but I'm just really glad it's still running at all (actually fairly well again since I gave it an SSD, too) and don't want to screw with it... Don't want to buy new stuff willy-nilly, either...
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TLDR: My PC's SSD is still fast but likes to freeze and corrupt my file system, its HDD seemed fine at first but has become quite slow with moments of unresponsiveness and weird errors (no case of FS corruption yet though) as well shortly after, and I have tried a million things but still no idea what's going on.
last year, I built my first own PC, containing among other things both the hard drive of my prematurely deceased HP laptop and a shiny new SSD - Crucial BX100, 250 GB. Things were nice, and instead of overheating from not even moderately demanding tasks, I could suddenly play Witcher 3 on high settings for hours and hours. I changed OS 2-3 times in the first few months, then stuck to Windows 7 for about half a year until one fateful day early this year, my system suddenly froze on me out of nowhere, I had a single-tab firefox open, basically. NTFS was corrupt, but I managed to get back into my system -somehow-, it didn't perform very well anymore though and later froze again. No errors shown in Eventviewer, but because of a fairly recent NVIDIA driver upgrade, I blamed it on that initially.
Fairly clueless, I kept changing things and hopping around different OSes, hoping something I did would bring salvation - and no matter what I installed, after a few hours, days or maybe 2 weeks at most, it would freeze, sometimes be rebootable, sometimes have a corrupted file system. Never got a single error in any logs, only after freezes/crashes from problems caused by these. Eventually, took me far longer than it should have, the devious culprit was found in my beloved SSD - not just improperly plugged but actually broken - after taking it out, I was able to run an OS (Windows 7, again, somehow) using just the HDD (which is a bit over 2.5 years old right now)... for maybe two months, then it also started doing weird stuff - being sluggish, having absurdly high disk utilization on an idle OS, becoming unreadable while active... my last install, a Debian LXDE which I just spent a good 2 painful days installing because first I had a bad ISO and then it took me a few attempts to realize I have to use the nvidia-backports driver rather than the regular one, suddenly just went "read only file system" on me after the terminal finally opened after 2-3 minutes of being stuck. Didn't even get to install iotop anymore, system is dead. It had already been notably slow on package installations before.
Surely I can't have 3 drives (my remaining laptop's HDD also failed this year, but at 9 years old...) failing within such short succession after not having a single issue in my 15 or so years of using computers before? I used Crystal Disk Info on both disks multiple times a while ago (before the HDD also started giving trouble), all green. The old drive (which was just reeeaaally slow, but not crashing or freezing) I updated my UEFI firmware rather late, but even after that it didn't change anything (I even plugged in my SSD - just the SSD - again and installed Mint, lasted a day...). Surely it has to be something else - my mainboard, my power supply, something?
Or am I that unlucky and a victim of gambler's fallacy here? Either way, it has turned from a troubleshooting challenge that I didn't even resent that much into pure frustration - if it hadn't been expensive for my standards, I would gladly throw my PC right into the trashcan at this point.
So how to be sure here? The obvious idea would be to plug one of these drives into my ancient but trusty surviving laptop, install something and see what happens, but I'm just really glad it's still running at all (actually fairly well again since I gave it an SSD, too) and don't want to screw with it... Don't want to buy new stuff willy-nilly, either...
-----
TLDR: My PC's SSD is still fast but likes to freeze and corrupt my file system, its HDD seemed fine at first but has become quite slow with moments of unresponsiveness and weird errors (no case of FS corruption yet though) as well shortly after, and I have tried a million things but still no idea what's going on.
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