Question – SSD or motherboard issue?

These past few months my Samsung 4TB 990 Pro SSD has been unresponsive twice already when installed in the 2nd M.2 slot of my motherboard. First time I was using come sort of GUI-based Robo Copy program to copy files to it and the program came up with an error coping message about 90% of the way through the copy process and quit the copying process. Another time I was playing Flight Simulator 2024 and about 2 minutes after take-off there was extreme stuttering and then the game froze on my and about 10 seconds later I got kicked out to the Windows 11 desktop interface. The game was installed on that SSD that was installed in that M.2 slot. Windows 11 was installed on the first M.2 slot on another Samsung 4TB 990 Pro. I then clicked on several program executable files that were stored on the 2nd 4TB 990 Pro and they were inaccessible and the icons changed to just a picture of blank sheet instead of the original icon showing next to the executable files. I checked event viewer and it mentioned several error 51, NTFS errors, and disk errors pertaining to that specific drive, and an event mentioning some kind of crashing message with Flight Simulator 2024 during that time period I was experiencing this issue. A reboot was required to get the files stored in that drive accessible again.

I took out that specific drive from my system and installed it in an external M.2 USB-C enclosure and decided to test backing up stuff to that drive from my Data partition on my 1st 990 Pro drive while the 2nd 990 Pro was installed in that USB-C enclosure. Twice it gave me an error message mentioning that it could copy a file over, a different file each time the copy error occurred, and quit the backup process both times. This happened within a 2-hour time period yesterday. It was connected to the front USB-C port of my case. Event Viewer shows several Error 153, 50 and NTFS, and Disk error events for that time period when the issue occurred. I also have been having other drives in USB external enclosures, different ones at that, drop out on me in this system randomly in the past in any USB port (front and back) and tried different cables but no resolve, so I suspect that it could be a motherboard issue.

Also I checked with CrystalDiskInfo and Samsung Magician the SMART information of that specific drive and no errors showed up. I also did a full surface scan using Samsung Magician on the specific drive and no bad blocks. I decided not to use that specific drive as a backup drive just to be safe and just use it as a Batocera drive (which I don’t have anything important that’s I can’t afford to lose installed on that drive now). Also yesterday I updated to the latest firmware for both 990 Pro’s in my system and reinstalled the 2nd 990 Pro in the 2nd M.2 slot, hoping either the latest firmware of that drive might fix that issue or it was not securly installed in the 2nd M.2 slot the first time and just needed a re-installation into that M.2 slot.

I have set USB Selective Suspend to Disabled in my Windows power plan but that does not resolve the drive disconnections during copying files for USB drives.

The motherboard in my system is an MSI Tomahawk X670E and my CPU is a Ryzen 7 9800X3D. The BIOS is updated to the latest version ans so is the firmware on the SSD.

Does this sound like specifically a motherboard issue, specifically with the 2nd M.2 slot and it’s USB ports by from what I’m saying here? Does this sound like just an issue with my 2nd Samsung 990 Pro SSD?