Problems with Pi booting from m.2 SSD - a cautionary tale

[/RaspberryPi]

I'm building a prototype using a Pi4 and based-on various advice I chose an Argon One case with the m.2 base unit - so that I could use a regular m.2 SATA SSD rather than SD for booting
The idea was it would be more reliable - in reality it was the opposite!! :(
During testing, someone plugged-in the USB hub to which the keyboard/mouse is attached for debugging/admin WITHOUT plugging the hub's power supply in first.
The Pi threw-up the 'Low Power' warning but then started to behave weirdly due to the fact it had 'ejected' the SSD (which connects via a USB bridge in the Argon Case)!!
I'm surprised it didn't crash but it wasn't able to actually do much and after a reboot things were still weird - a quick FSCK showed files corrupted so I'm assuming the whole thing needs reformatting and rebuilding at this point.
This is something which wouldn't have happened to Pi running from SD Card so I'm kicking myself I didn't stick with that - I'm going back to booting from SD and I'll use the SSD for writing logs/archive data to reduce traffic on the SD as much as possible...
I thought I'd highlight this - I'm sure others have encountered similar issues but I'd say it's a strong positive to the SD Card as boot drive!?
p.s. before anyone asks - using an official PI PSU and yes, this could happen to regular USB drives but I'm guessing they have a lower power demand than the m.2->USB interface...

submitted by /u/shrewdlogarithm
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