I would like to narrow this down to what specific hardware failure I am dealing with before investing money. Someone else has been suggesting I get an external SSD. How do I confirm that the HDD is the problem, and, if it is, then will an external SSD (most likely) solve it?
To be clear - I don't plan on mining with this set up. Just participate in blockchain integrity and create wallets once in awhile. I am hoping that if I can get through the IBD, then I can keep bitcoin core running on this machine a little while.
Jul 12 11:15:40 ThinkPad kernel: ata1.00: ATA Identify Devi>
Jul 12 11:15:40 ThinkPad kernel: ata1.00: ATA Identify Devi>
It is 100% a hardware failure. Kernel prints out ata1.xx messages when there is a problem reading data from the filesystem (due to an underlying hardware error). Sympthoms also include extremely high load times for no apparent reason - caused by a bottleneck while read(2)'ing data from the disk.
The hard disk can fail independently of the fan and CPU temperature.