Multiple hard drive failure

Initially I had a seagate hard drive from 2005 with XP then midway through 2008, BSOD became extremely frequent (Whenever I watched videos in full screen or streamed videos off the internet or played online games maybe even playing games which were installed on the computer). On the BSOD's file names such as "atapi.sys", kernel data etc... names which effectively meant my hard drive was going. But I didn't take any action until late 2008 my hard drive started to give in I started hearing click of death and all the usual symptoms to hard drive failure (i.e. cursor being unresponsive) so i finally bought a new hard drive (again seagate) and installed Vista business and transferred a majority of my files over to the new hard drive(Office doc, xls, ppt, music files etc...) via a removable hard drive.

5 months later my new hard drive starts to fail and gets to the point that when the Vista loading screen comes up it just hangs. So I then go buy a new hard drive (western digital) (again install Vista Business) so to access my files off of the previous hard drive, I slave the previous hard drive. 1 week later my latest hard drive(western digital) fails (frequent BSODs with references to kernel, atapi.sys, sATA.sys etc...).

Now my sitution is this, it is understandable why my first hard drive went it may be because it recieved a physical knock during moving as I am a university student and obviously take my PC back and forth from home over the holidays, but the 2 new hard drives havn't moved an inch.

My question is, are my hard drives failing due to a possiblity that there is a file(virus) that is automatically transferring itself onto the new hard drives which are causing them to fail or is that not possible. Because I wish to connect my ipod to my new laptop which has not had any thing transferred to it but my ipod has obviously been connected to my previous hard drives so may I possibly have an undectable virus living somewhere in my ipod.

I have scanned the most recent hard drive and ipod with AVGfree and Ad-aware and everything is apparently clean.

thanks for the reply its definetely not a bad cable because i tried 3 different cables because i initially thought that might be the problem however along those lines it could be a bad connection on the motherboard but i have no idea how i can go about checking if that is the problem.

My PSU is 400W 230V made by a manufacturer called COLORS and TBH i dont know much about itt as i was satisfied with whatever came with the case

Well like i said in my original post I am mostly concerned about damaging my new hard drive on my laptop by plugging my ipod up to it because i might just be sending my old pc to the scrap yard its just too out of date. So if some-one can positively rule out any chance of that happpening I would greatly appreciate it.