Way back in like 2006 when I was in middle school, a friend of mine pulled me aside to tell me there's more than just Windows and Mac. His parents worked IT and they showed him a lot of stuff and he showed it to me. I installed Slackware on a laptop with him. I basically just did as he said.
In high school, I looked more into it and tried installing some other distros but landed on DSL as the laptop my parents got me was a piece of shit and it worked good enough. I moved onto Ubuntu later because DSL can only do so much and really struggled with it lol.
And then as the years went by and Ubuntu started to suck I moved onto a variety of other distros like Arch(which took me 2 days to install and I fucked it up), Void(which also took me 2 days to install), Mint, and when it finally came out I tried things like SteamOS, Bazzite, and Nobara.
This all as I was dualbooting with Windows. I never took any classes, I never read any books on it, I just figured it out by doing it, breaking my OS a bunch of times, chatting with friends and randos on forums and Reddit, and the man command, thank GOD for that. All that and I just come back to Mint which I adore for its ease of use.
So all my knowledge is muscle memory. What the actual fuck does a package manager do? Like I know generally, but there's more to them than just downloading shit? What is the difference between Systemd and OpenRC? WHAT THE FUCK IS HYPRLAND OR WAYLAND!? I DON'T UNDERSTAND! 20 YEARS AND I LEARNED FUCKING NOTHING!
shoutouts to tux
Oh, Fedora updates have been known to break stuff occasionally and that honestly blows! I do hope you'll be able to figure it all out in the end because that seems like this is going to cause you a terrible troubleshooter headache. As the issue seems so arbitrary yet it is a major issue, at least the SMART data itself is fine but...Damn that is a crazy issue to have to diagnose.
Haven't had the time to really look at it yet, but the logfiles look like single drives become disconnected for fractions of a second while smart data is read - not long enough to cause them to become dismounted. So i can't really rule out some strange hardware issue too... Preliminary web search isnt too forthcoming with possible reasons -.- If i find out what the reason is, i'll update here.
EDIT: THINK I FIXED IT! It seems like the USB cable leading to the external drive case was damaged (i thought of that because i hit my foot on the table and it instantly reported a SMART error) - since i replaced the cable, i did not have any more occurrences. I do NOT have the slightest clue why this would affect reading SMART data from the other drives tho...
Edit 2: Yep, no issues since then. I can only suspect that grabbing smart data when the cable malfunctioned stalled the service, and what hard drive was reported was whereever the internal logic had to wait for the stalled service - pretty strange, but the only way i can explain how devices on a different controller and different PSUs were showing up too.