The IBM's dying, I'm not surprised, particularly if it was one from the 75- or 60GXP line.

I don't know if you still have the drives lying around or what, but you might see if the diagnostic utility from IBM or Maxtor gives any type of error code for you to work with. If it's the same exact problem of failure between all 3, that'd be nice as it might point to the same problem. Might be the IDE cable having some funky issue, but you should've experienced some sort of disk issue instead of a total failure. The IDE port could be screwed up and fail to detect, and in that case, put it on a different IDE port or even another PC to eliminate your system as any potential problem---which has been done on at least one occasion.

Too little power from the power supply might cause premature death, but unless you've been getting some severely underpowered PSU's and not experiencing instability oddly enough.

Beyond a string of just bad luck, I'm not sure what the issue is. I can't really see where power management has any role in this at all either.