Well, I've finally found the culprit causing me issues for my office computer, which apparently is a faulty SSD!
See, this is an issue I've been spending over a
year trying to diagnose, because there was no BSoD, no tracible errors to research. Everything appeared like a graphics card or graphics driver issue. Since the system would more or less "lockup" graphically in a weird way.
By weird, is where YouTube videos would look frozen, or turn into a slide show, but the audio plays perfectly like nothing's wrong. Sometimes switching browser tabs around would update pages where you can still technically use it. The clock on the taskbar is frozen visually. Some elements would stay on screen and not go away, like part of a context menu, but the computer is never fully locked up. As proven with Youtube and Discord because when Discord also visually "locks up", I can still send messages and screenshots.
Sometimes it was once a month, or once every few months this would happen. I've tried check disk, and even the windows system repair commands via command prompt in Windows 10.
I've even did fresh graphics card driver installs, even different graphics drivers. Which seemed like the issues became more frequent once I messed around with the graphics drivers. I even updated the BIOS on the system, swapped out RAM, and everything. I've had the issue almost happen daily to being problem free for several months. Problem came back again pretty much daily again.
I was wanting to downsize the office computer anyway with an upgrade, so I got a Minisforum MS-A1 machine. I wanted to do a fresh install of Windows on it, and just take my second SSD out of my desktop and put here since most of my data with documents, music, art work and all were there.
But I still wanted to copy some stuff off the main SSD onto there to have the remainder. This is when I discovered that the primary drive had issues...
This kind of error, popped up on a lot of things. Which lead me to check one other thing...
The quick scan found nothing, but a full scan shows a different story... and of course, this is the last point it reached before things visually locked up again, and me sending myself the screenshot on Discord.
So I'm led to believe the SSD's failing, even though the health status was still showing good, and I had no critical errors in the S.M.A.R.T. data that I could tell of... everything just showed fine, until I started copying everything off, which led me to trying to do a deeper dive here.
I think the next thing I want to do is pull that SSD, do a full scan through another machine, get the results... then do a complete wipe, and rescan it and see what the state is. At this point there's enough for me to never trust this drive again. It's definitely an odd experience for me.
I was too stubborn to do a simple Windows reinstall because I wanted to figure out the issue.
