Can a faulty motherboard kill external HDDs?

Last year I got a new external HDD (drive 1) which failed without warning in less than 2 months. I got it replaced with a different but also new external drive (drive 2), and now four months later it has also started to fail. I have a secondary external drive (drive 3), this one several years old, which had been humming along fine... until now. It just started to pop paging operation errors. I don't plug and unplug these drives at all and rarely move them, if once a month that's too much. Never touch them when they're spinning. They're lying flat quietly in their corner. All three drives were

Question by Rhaenys on Super User, licensed CC BY-SA. We show a short excerpt and link to the original thread as credit.