My favorite story, of which I heard a few very similar sounding ones over the years, is the case of dead SanDisk SATA SSDs _sometimes_ timing out on all command

My favorite story, of which I heard a few very similar sounding ones over the years, is the case of dead SanDisk SATA SSDs _sometimes_ timing out on all commands after booting up. So if you have one of those drives in your system and you have one of 3 common motherboard vendors, you'll sometimes just get a black screen. This seems to occur consistently when the computer was on in the last 30 minutes, leading most to assume bad motherboard or PSU. I replaced an entire aging system because I couldn't nail down the issue - and then it followed me into the new one because I falsely assumed a misbehaving drive wouldn't cause my BIOS to wait forever. This was the most frustrating year I've had with computers where I'd run my machine 24/7, just so I wouldn't have to deal with repeatedly trying to turn it on with 30 minute breaks in between.