Hoping someone with experience in failures of this sort may be able to help me.

Back in Feb this year, my WHS2011 OS/SSD failed after about 18 months of use. I left the server off for a few days as it was the weekend. Before pulling the drive for warranty replacement I turned the server back on to write down the exact error but instead of an error the server started up like nothing had happened. It stayed happy for a couple of weeks and then took its last gasp. PBTech took the drive back to send away to Intel, I was told it could take up to 3 weeks. 
Meanwhile... I purchased a shiny new 500GB normal HDD to restore the WHS2011 image to while waiting for the replacement SSD. 
The replacement SSD was duly supplied but it is still in its box.

Then yesterday, the server died again, this time the new OS HDD being at fault, and reporting during BIOS startup "A disk read error has occurred. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart." Multiple reboots gave the same result.
This drive has been in service a mere 5 weeks.
I left the whole thing off last night and turned it on again this morning, and yes, it has started up, although it did do a CHKDSK all by itself before loading the OS.
I now have a found.000 folder with 1 file in it, file0000.chk.

Stablebit Scanner says the drive is perfectly healthy, and Home Server SMART 2013 says the drive has a high CRC error count (922 of them).
Neither program gave any warning of the two failed drives.

So now I am wondering, is it some sort of coincidence that both OS drives have "failed" well before their time?
Both drives used the same SATA cable and port.
The box is about 6.5 years old. The HDD's range in age from 4yrs to 5 weeks, but everything else in the box is pretty much original, , m/b, CPU, PSU, RAM etc. The SATA cable for the OS HDD is an original cable.

Are disk read errors caused by faulty disks, or can they be caused by other factors?
Your feedback would be most appreciated.