alt Hacker NewsFor system failure, yes, but not if data retention and recovery is your primary concern.
When building a device primarily used for storing personal things, I'd much prefer to save money on the motherboard and risk that failing than skimping on the drives themselves
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You actually want reliable MB & RAM to ensure data doesn't get corrupted in memory first. Since you have various ways of writing data to disks that offer you resiliency.
Eh, cheap motherboards aren't a panacea that can't hurt the rest of the hardware, I personally don't skimp on motherboards, and would much rather skimp on the drives themselves as I have redundancy and 1-2 drives failing wouldn't hurt too much. And data retention is my top priority.
Motherboards have fried connected hardware before, poor grounding/ESD protections, firmware bugs together with aggressive power management, wiring weirdness and power related faults have broken people's drives before.
What I've never heard about is a drive breaking something else in a system, but broken motherboards have taken friends with them more than once.
Don't skimp on the power supply either. A dodgy PSU can torch all devices attached to it.
How do I know? I've had two drives and one MB fail in quick succession thanks to a silently failing power supply.