Over my long career (approaching 40 years) I've seen any number of peripheral devices that responded to bad instructions by tearing themselves to pieces. One example would be a HDD driver that inadvertently ordered the R/W heads to move to a nonexistent location. That's pretty common, and sometimes results from a bug in the code, not anyone's intention.
Another common error is to allow a system power shutdown without parking the HDD R/W heads in a sacrificial area, so subsequent mechanical shocks won't cause the heads to collide with a legitimate data surface. This problem can be caused by insufficient power supply capacity -- a capacity that must detect the power shutdown and allow the head traversal to complete before the remaining power is used up.
