You might like the book Determined by Robert Sapolsky. It’s very dense and I haven’t gotten far into it yet but it’s about the science of free will.

One of those people who used to make Linux related content and then became an anti woke grifter

I had written half the post before I got the idea that the large SSDs were causing my smaller USBs to fail too. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case. Further testing indicates that my 128GB USB drive doesn’t work, but a 32 GB one with Ventoy does work.

It doesn’t appear to be a specific chipset as when the drives show up in gnome-disks I can see the chipset. The two that I just tested are Realtek and Phison.