I might be a bit long winded here, so for tl;dr version just jump on the questions section.
So, recently I bought a pair of new drives, one SSD and Seagate's new 1TB SSHD.
Just a week ago, last Sunday - Monday night, strange things started happening. I stopped playing Mount and Blade: WFaS after few hours, and suddenly the whole system came to a complete, utter stop. And when it came back to good few seconds later, another such freeze followed shortly. In the end, I chose to shut it down the hard way. Over the next few days, troubles sometimes seemed non-existent, sometimes repeated after playing M&B again. Freezing to a point task manager won't even show up, and when it does, suddenly everything works again. I sometimes saw Windows' WerFault.exe appear in TM, but no actual "this application has stopped responding" window. Sometimes troubles stopped after restart/shut down and power on later, sometimes they persisted even though the computer was shut down for a longer period, so I am excluding overheating of (nearly) any sort. I modified the system according to
this guide (everything but step 9), thinking it might be SSD (boot drive) problem. Seemed fine for a day, then again the same. Also clean installed GPU drivers, thinking that might be the problem since no freezing was noticed when running things like browser instead of a game (though M&B isn't that demanding...). Still nothing.
But yesterday I started to hear strange clicking sound. I payed no attention to it at first, but today I finally realized this does come in fact from my SSHD. And it doesn't sound like something normal.
And thing is, I have Steam on it. So I unplug the drive, run SSD only, and voila, no problem detected so far. Only thing bothering me is apart from one game of LoL I didn't run anything graphically demanding yet.
I did a lot of search on the net over last couple of days, but couldn't get any definite answer what might be the problem until today. Now, the symptoms are almost similar to those of hard drive failure I experienced just few weeks ago. The freezing started to appear even during the gameplay and today Windows run automatically disk check of D: (SSHD) after a hard reset I was forced to do in the morning. Did quite some deleting, fixing and recovering, but nothing really changed. Still, I'm not sure, so here are my actual answers:
1. Is it possible a failing PSU is causing power fluctuation so that in a setup of one boot and one storage drive the storage one misbehaves to the point of freezing entire system and making just too many clicking sounds?
2. Could a failing GPU be the cause?
3. Could the failing moba be the cause? I noticed once during one of the general instability periods the writing speed of plugged-in USB stick went drastically down to the point of more or less stopping (though it DID copy from SSHD so...)
4. Or is it really that supposedly brand new SSHD just dying on me?
Might also ask on official Seagate forums though. Might also run official Seagate check disk tool. But I'm asking because, as I said, couldn't get a definite answer on the net and this is the first place I'd ask if any of you just had a similar experience with ANY of the above things failing or just some general suggestions. Thanks.