Why are my hard drives exploding?

[mcfluffin]

Hey all,
Basic idea: I insert hard drives into the backplane while on or off (ie hot or cold) and sometimes they die horrible deaths involving magic smoke. I've lost a 500GB and a 1TB drive so far. Newegg reviews indicate shoddy quality on the backplane, but nothing this serious, most complaints are about snapping power connectors.
I recently bought a new Norco RPC-4220 chassis. I have a Supermicro X7DB8+ board and a 600W Thermaltake PS. The board is a bit large (EEATX), which you wouldn't think would fit, but there were extra standoff holes and I was able to rearrange them to get the board to fit very nicely. I did have to turn the power supply 90 degrees to fit, but I was able to bolt it to a fan grill area after removing a fan and it rests nicely on a ledge. Everything runs fine in this configuration so I don't suspect this is the issue. I checked the BIOS voltage readings and compared them to a similar computer I have that has a Supermicro X7DVE board and an 850W Rosewill power supply. Voltage readings were similar and more or less lined up to an uncalibrated multimeter I had lying around.
The backplane has only support for 5V/12V, but I don't see any 3.3V requirements on any of the SATA drives, so I don't think this is an issue. One big point I'm pondering is that the backplane double power connectors are suppose to be for redundancy. Lacking cables, I only attached one Molex connector to each backplane. Possible culprit? Like other people say, I have also had problems getting trays to slide in smoothly compared to say the backplane on my desktop or some of the SCSI servers I've had. One of the Delta screamers also took a chunk out of my finger due to me stupidly thinking the fan grill was better than it was, so this server has been very trouble.
The first drive that died I thought was from the tray buckling and shorting against the drive, so I tried insulating another drive, but it died as well and I realized it was overheating, not being shorted. These drives both died within about a second after being plugged in/power on.
I sent an e-mail to Norco and I'm awaiting their official response. However, if anyone has had any experience with similar issues, I'd much appreciate the input. If any pictures or other info is needed, I'll be happy to give it. Thanks!