LIGISTX

Do what now..? No one should ever just cut wires lol. OP, multiple possibilities. Potentially put the fan in quiet mode in the BIOS if the BIOS has such options, tell it to ignore that fans RPM if it has that option. Buy a in line resistor (noctua sell them) to reduce the voltage to the fan and thus reduce its RPM, or upgrade to a higher quality lower noise fan. Typically PC’s only freak out if you unplug the CPU fan.... is this the CPU fan your talking about?

Easy. I use Macrium reflect, but there are many tools you can use. Clone it, tell the BIOS to use the M.2 as boot, and your done

Is the mobo possibly contacting the mobo tray shorting something out? What thermal paste did you use, possibly was it conductive and you got it over some traces or something? Seems like you tried all the typical troubleshoot solutions including using a diff CPU which makes this either a situation where something is shorting, or you somehow did fry the mobo in the swap, although that seems very unlikely.

Totally possible.... just not "easy".

I am sure its possible to DIY a paracord onto the mouse USB cable, but getting it past the USB end is going to be a massive pain/not possible. I end of the USB is just much larger than the cable itself, its hard to have something that will both fit over the end and fit well on the cable. If someone sells a product, itll likely work ok enough assuming the reviews seem ok, but I am not aware of one.

Why change the feet..? They are likely the best option already.

Is it a thermal pad, or a thermal super thin little graphite sheet? If its a pad, like is squishy and thick, that is not at all acceptable to use for a GPU or CPU; they just do not have the thermal transfer efficiency, and are very thick which impedes heat transfer. If it was a graphite sheet, it should have been fine enough, although for the GPU it very well may have been too thin. Definitely just use paste, why did you even try this in the first place?

100% this. Rule 1 of RAID: RAID IS NOT A BACKUP Rule 2 of RAID: RAID IS NOT A BACKUP Rule 3 of RAID: RAID IS STILL NOT A BACKUP Use backblaze for ~6 bucks a month to get all of the data in the cloud. This way if your PC takes a dump, your not SOL. I have a NAS I keep all of my photos on (amateur photographer, I shoot D850 and have approaching 2 TB of images). They are all in my homelab (NAS) in a RAID Z2, PLUS they are backed up to backblaze. Always keep an off site backup, preferably by a backup provider. You can self encrypt using backblaze as well, so they

Its a software RAID managed by windows. Its just as safe as any other RAID, if anything its "more safe" as its not hardware dependent.

Use storage spaces as previously stated by @Electronics Wizardy

Updating the bios isn’t “dangerous”. Just don’t unplug or power off the machine while your doing it. Updating your BIOS is always a good place to start with issues like that.

Pretty accurate in my experience. I have a random older board running some homelab type stuff, it has a intel 4000 series i5. I am able to turn off cores as I tried this to save some power as this particular box needs very little oomf, turns out that saved less than 1 watt so I just turned em back on lol.

For the PC, any SSD is fine as it doesn't care. The Mac, possibly there are some that have proven to play nicer, but I am not sure. Last time I swapped an SSD into a macbook was in ~2010. Can you run macOS on Ryzen..? There are drivers? Its hard enough to get hackintosh happy on Intel, but.... sure?

A 10700k can't possibly draw more current than an 8 can provide. I have a 10700k as well, and I do have all 12 pins plugged in simply because my PSU also has them available, but if your PC is already built and wires ran, no need to run more cables for this, it really is pointless.

Yup. Well, plug it into one of the rear USB ports, if that’s what you meant by “plug it into my motherboard”.