It strange but new hard disks fail fast i have 5 there are around 20 years old and they still work. but many new do not last more than 5 years. Do you think they are cutting corners now and use cheap material to make them these days. It is the same with Playstation 2 and DVD players, they rarely work more than 5 years before they break down
I think the disk thrashing of Windows and maybe other OS's too (can't speak for them) kills hard disks (VM etc). File fragmentation will also reduce the life just as much. And then you have to remember that they're packing 200GB on a disk that 20 years previous held just 20MB, so tolerences are thousands of times tighter now.
