No, a damaged motherboard cannot directly harm hard drives.
No, a damaged motherboard cannot directly harm hard drives.
Hello! The offer you received seems legitimate, but there are a few things to consider. The motherboard comes with a CPU, cooler, and ECC RAM, all fully supported. While it’s important to weigh the pros and cons—like potential risks to your storage devices—there’s no inherent reason the board would damage your hard drives or SSDs unless you handle them improperly during installation. Always follow proper setup procedures to minimize any risk.
I mean anything can happen, though chances are slim. A PSU would be more likely to cause harm than an MB in my view. I wouldn't worry too much about it. The simplest way to feel confident is to connect a single HD and plug it into one port at a time, start it up, and check if it's recognized in the BIOS.
What I intended to express is that it's improbable for a board to completely destroy a drive. However, it's conceivable. The most probable outcome is damaging the drive, which would likely require reformatting for a different operating system. In extreme situations, it might even impact the drive's firmware, similar to destruction, but this is extremely rare.
Well there was the first version of the Sandy Bridge chipset that caused data corruption and was recalled because of it. I know I had one of those boards. But as long as it's not something that has been recalled due to a design fault like that you should be fine and as someone mentioned more likely to lose data due to a bad PSU than a bad motherboard.