My HDDs from 1994 (and earlier) were still running flawlessly, but I sold them on fleabay the other day.
The hardware was from IBM mostly. Twenty years of service with various flavors of Classic are not that bad methinks. Your mileage will vary, especially for El-Cheapo HDDs.

I've had to reformat a few times but I've NEVER has a drive fail (at the hardware level) that I could trace back to a piece of software - OS or othwerwise.

Note that I've been VERY cautious when doing ANY sort of firmware change.

Gary

To answer the OP's question, No.

Mabe accumulated 40+ such hard drives in many Macs. Many are 10 years old, more are 15 years old, a few are 20 years, one (from 1987) is over 25 years old. No failures in drives of that era, or on a Mac running Mac OS 9 and earlier.
BUT, I have had 2 drive failures in modern drives, both SATA, both under OSX 10.5 and later.

24bit, loved the "El-Cheapo" answer to our spanish speaking member

Now a little bit of history, which most of you probably already know. Not sure if it's true or urban myth. The first computer virus ever, was a program on IBM that caused the disk head to move to a certain track and then back again, and back and forth at a reasonant frequency for the drive, until the arm for the disk head shook itself free, causing drive failure. I think it's probably a myth, I'm not sure how a hard disk unit would have a reasonant frequency that the arm could accentuate.

I've disassembled a couple of drives (circa 1984) that were fascinating on the inside. They had 8 platters (16 surfaces) and massive heads. As I recall, they were 20 MB drives.

The weight of the heads and the sheer number of them lend some credibility to the virus bertyboy describes.

In modern drives, the single platter and ultra-tiny heads suggest that such a virus would be impossible.

Gary

More off topic:
Resonance may be an issue. Just think about infantry marching over bridges or the Larsen effect.
Hard to tell though, how a virus would know the HHDs resonance was achieved.
I would think it was a modern fairy tale, like the one about a virus residing in the computers clock chip.

Well I did hear it some 25+ years ago, when there was one model of IBM desktop with one model of hard disk available, so the virus writers experiment with a disk of their own.