This wasn't a Sun E450 was it? We had one (of a "matched" pair) that was "haunted" as well. Drives died, Sun replaced drives. Drives died again. Sun replaced SCSI controller and drives. Drives died again. Sun replaced motherboard, SCSI controller, memory, and drives. Drives died again, and we make the (at the time) scary move to Pentium III app servers, which were inexpensive enough to triple up compared to SPARC, but even better, drives didn't die.
We swapped out the E450s for 440s for Oracle when we moved to InterNAP, and all seemed to be well.
Hearing your story, I wouldn't be surprised if we had just enough/wrong vibration in the case to make it go Tacoma Narrows on us.
These haunted servers were actually supermicro barebones chassis.
It has been a (long) while since I have seen the inside of an e450 but iirc there were a bunch of fans in trays in there. So it is certainly possible that the vibration did bad things. I still carry one of the e450 era keys on my keychain as a momento.
We swapped out the E450s for 440s for Oracle when we moved to InterNAP, and all seemed to be well.
Hearing your story, I wouldn't be surprised if we had just enough/wrong vibration in the case to make it go Tacoma Narrows on us.