At work, I encountered a HD which fried SATA ports. If you plugged that HD in a SATA port of another computer, that SATA port didn't work anymore. I don't know if the HD had been damaged by the computer it was originally from, but we didn't use both that HD and that computer anymore.
There have been other stories of "contagious" hardware damage in the past, like the infamous ZIP drive "click of death", but that HD is the first one I've seen personally.
Just had that with a SATA SSD - looks like it had a power bus short and it blew a chip (dual FETs) on the caddy backplane. Lots of smoke.
Usual story: replacement part is about £0.50 and I could replace it in the lab, but postage for one part is £4.
Might see if I can get one as a sample, or from the Far East with 'free shipping'.
Many moons ago, I worked in the education sector and some smart kid ran a paper stapler up a keyboard lead, leaving it full of metal staples. The power short blew an axial fuse on the motherboard. The next user encountered a 'dead keyboard', so they swapped it for the one on the next desk..repeat 6 times before someone realised the fault was travelling with the keyboard...
There have been other stories of "contagious" hardware damage in the past, like the infamous ZIP drive "click of death", but that HD is the first one I've seen personally.