I’ve acquired a second hand Thinkpad T14 recently (gen 1, Intel version). Running Fedora Gnome.
The SSD seems fine.
I tested it with Gnome Disks; I filled the drive with files and checked their integrity; also copied files around, on drive and from USB. No issues.
But many downloaded files become corrupted. The download finishes normally, but if If I try to open said files they fail (in the middle of a video for example) and if I copy them I get an “input/output” error.
LAN or WAN, over ethernet or Wifi, it doesn’t matter.
Could it still be the SSD? Or maybe a driver issue?
Thank you for reading!


can you do some tests?
I hope you have some other machine (for example a phone).
now download the same file on both devices (ideally do it for more than 1 file, and pick something which is static)(static here means file does not change. if for example you download a video from a site, and they encode all their streams live, there is possibility that file result is slightly different).
now find hashes for both the files. i am not going to explain what is a hash here, but if you want a brief, imagine it being a unique id for each file.
to find it, go to terminal and type
md5sum <path>where path is the file path (to know the path, you can often just drag a file from your graphical file man manager into terminal and it should auto fill the path).this will produce a strange looking string.
do this for file on both devices (if you are on a phone, this is hard. instead, you can try to copy to your linux desktop, preferably with a wired connection to reduce variables).
if both hashes are same, the files are same. in this situation, your file viewer/player is broken. there are possibilities of your memory being bad or drivers being bad but these are miniscule.
there is another possibility that your drive is either out of space, or out of inodes (something fancy, related to filesystem, not explaining that here). input/output error can often happen from such things. in this situation, best course of action is boot a live iso, and clean the disk (for example, if it is a btrfs partition, and it keeps making snapshots which are not cleaned properly, or some bad program keeps creating extremely tiny files, extremely fast).
we need a lot more information if this is the case.
if file hash is different, then it is simpler - either your downloader is borked (use a different browser, or use command line downloader, like wget/curl/aria2), or your disk is broken, or your file system is borked (something similar to above but more pronounced).
changing browser/downloader fixes the problem - you are golden. if not, try swapping out the ssd, and reformat a fresh install.
I checked the drive’s health with badblocks tonight, which wiped everything unfortunately.
Then I tried another distro (Ubuntu) and the issue was gone.
I didn’t check the hash for failing files, but I downloaded with rsync also and the issue still happened.
Thank you very much for your help though. When I find the time I’ll reinstall Fedora, and if the issue repeats itself I’ll do more tests.