Eclipse Frozen: the strange case of the SSD disk

It started on Thursday of the last week: while I was happily developing within Eclipse my home computer got frozen, nothing was responding, including the Plasma desktop. After a couple of minutes, I rebooted the computer, increased the amount of memory related to Eclipse and started working again.

On the next Monday I got the same behavior, again while working within Eclipse. I’m not a big fan of Eclipse anymore, I believe it is too much huge nowdays, and so I blamed Eclipse 2019-12 as the responsible of this whole Plasma desktop freeze. I then tried, after a reboot, to keep Eclipse resources at a miminum, for example closing not interesting projects, but with an increasing frequency, the computer was freezing and I was getting nervous.
I then start digging into the Eclipse workspace logs, without any success. Also the Linux logs were not reporting anything, the computer simply stopped working.
In the meantime I have experienced slowing computer performances, and I’ve noted hat only 2 GBs out of my 240 GBs Solid State Disk were left. I therefore decided to trash some stuff to make more room on the disk, and the computer immediatly started to behave better.
But then, again, it froze.

As a last resort, I tried to update Eclipse from 2019-12 to 2020-03, a couple of time without any success.
I then started to move my stuff out from the hme folder to another partition (on the same disk) in the hope to get it resuming its performances.

But here the clue: while rsyncing content, in particular a quite large git project, the computer froze again.
Could it be something related to git? Quick, run git gc on the project! And in fact the project was moved to another partition easily, so that mademe hope again I found and fixed the problem, that appeared to be due to git misbehaving in Eclipse and on the filesystem.
But the very next day, another freeze.
Ok, enough for me: get rid of Eclipse! Let’s install Netbeans.
But I was unable to complete the installation, since the computer was freezing every time I attempted to run the installer.

Ok, there was nothing remaining except the hard disk drive. My Sandisk SSD 240 GB was misbehaving after only two years of usage.
So, here I’m removing the hard disk and substituting it with another SSD, reinstalling the operating sysem from scratch and hoping this can be a solution.

It is not as simple as it is

Reinstalling an operating system from scratch is a very long activity: you have to reconfigure the whole system.
But luckily I placed the old SSD disk into a container and attached it via USB: I was able to restore pretty much everything in a matter of hours (yes, USB 1!). And the Sandisk SSD was always working, I suspect USB was not pushing pressure on the data bus.
Of course, the hardest part was to remember how to unlock my encrypted home folder, but thanks to ecryptfs-recover-pivate I was able to unlock the content and get back many of my settings, including git repositories not yet pushed!