Thought I heard they have a limited number of times they can rewrite. Don't recall the number but I'm thinking 10K rewrites.

SLC and MLC NAND FLASH can endure that many writes, but not TLC (I've seen numbers in the 300-1000 range). NAND FLASH can ship with bad blocks that are marked before shipping and you always have to use error correction.

WRT to SSDs, manufacturers have implemented overprovisioning to extend lifetime. They allocate something like 10% of the total capacity to use as spares.

 

The PC in question is 1.5 years old. I actually thought it was older. Turns out it's under warranty still. (WOOT!)
The Data storage device is a SSD. The only moving parts inside this PC are the Fans and they're all working fine.
IIRC, it seems the noise I heard came through the connected speakers....not from the PC itself.
I thought I was fairly knowledgeable on Windows 10, but someone introduced me to the "Reliability Reports" screen and that is a useful tool. If you've never seen it, just click the windows icon lower left, then type in RELIABILITY, then click VIEW RELIABILITY HISTORY

This is the motheboard in question. Not exactly an easy repair job. The manufacturer (I would imagine) has a test apparatus that can probably scan every component and test every circuit on the board and find issues.

As far as the conductivity of dust.....
There is usually humidity in the air. More so in some homes. I live in a VERY humid climate. Tropical in fact. It was in the 80's today (Jan 9)
But, it could at times be enough to add just enough moisture to the dust to make just barely conductive enough to cause a problem.
What say you? I'd bet there are studies available that answer this question.

 

Thanks for the Reliability tip. That was news to me.

 

I have no reason to believe the dust in my home is particularly "metallic". Just what I would call common dust that settles on surfaces over time.
I recently had a motherboard failure and I cannot find the cause.
Usually I blow out the dust in my computers once a year with compressed air but I think I missed last year with this one.

It worked perfectly for years until the other night when I was just sitting in my office and I heard a strange BRRRRRUP sound from it and that was it.
It went dead but I was able to eventually restart it but now it randomly freezes or reboots at practically any time.

As far as the dust, I would not say it was heavy, but it was visibly there. A light dusting on the horizontal surfaces which included the upper facing circuit board side of the graphics card.

What is the likelihood that dust shorted out my PC? Is it even possible?

Your symptoms initially pointed to a PUS problem. Been there and done that with an old 600 Watt Cooler Master supply. Finally came the loud pop, a plume of smoke and game over. Replaced it and the PC worked fine. Since you have replaced the PSU we can rule that out. Dust will cause heating issues but you may want to also check any and all fans on the board with a focus on the CPU Heat Sink fan. Make sure all fans are running or behaving as expected. Next I would be looking at the capacitors on the board for signs of bulging or leakage. Just about any intermittent problem will cause a PSU to fault leading to odd shutdowns or reboots.

Hard drives? There was software at one time to actually look at hard drive health. Not sure what is out there today. My wifes PC is about 2 or 3 years old and is on 24/7. Her OS is on a solid state drive and all her mass storage on several 2.0 TB drives in a RAID array. With the solid state drive we have yet to have an issue but yes, there could be a drive problem. This is why both her PC and my PC backup everything to each other and a NAS box. On her last PC the motherboard died but all her data was saved using backup image.

If you do not find your problem causing the symptoms I would make sure anything and everything you have on that PC is backed up and safely stored somewhere. Things will likely get worse till one day comes the poof. Then you are yanking out HDDs trying to retrieve data. I doubt dust, conductive or otherwise is your problem.

Good Luck
Ron

Oh wow, I would be looking into the warrantee. Just saw your last post. Whatever this is I do not see it getting better.

 

Maybe the noise you heard was a hack. Someone sent you a virus that would mimmic a short circuit and make you think something blew up. I worked with a guy who had extra speakers for his computer. Every morning he'd come in and start up his computer. I copied a file from the internet that had dinosaurs farting. I captured one really nasty fart and uploaded it to his computer then named it with the original file name and changed the old file name to be the same name but with the letters OLD after it so I could easily find it when I got in trouble for doing that. So for a while every morning when he started his computer, speakers up loud, came a gross fart. That was an April Fool's joke. Went over pretty good. But I had to restore the original sound.