The mystery deepens. Deep in OCD  territory now, for I did not abandon the terminally ill device, but have nursed it along whilst studying the underlying morbidity.

Apparently (apologies) this model (dx5150) is known for its bad caps that are made badder due to *overheating* in the SFF case. If true, the damage was (likely) done during the mad, overheat the whole fucking building episode and, by all accounts, unrecoverable, being I lack SMD soldering skills. Others have suggested replacing the psu, yeah but no.

Anyhoo, the server stays up just so long as I don't do anything with it except (for example) "watch -n 20 uptime" via ssh console. It's been up for ~4-hours today!!!  :-O~~~

When I go and use it for anything useful, such as mounting a share, it typically goes down within an hour or two, which is enough time to get stuff done, I suppose  :-S .

Haven't tried the swapping the new ssd into my other, newer (5750 IIRC) model old Mrs.D pc trick as yet, but it approaches.

Edit: Whelp, I guess it didn't like the report card ^^^ because yesterday it stayed up ~10-hours and I got some use out of it as a dev server before normal shutdown via console at 5pm.