Damn, my last two harddrives have failed in around 3 years exactly. Did I have bad luck or am I being too mean to them?
My computer is on mostly all the time and is often reading files throughout the night (for slow uploads for example). Does it make a difference how often you read/write a drive or only the spun-up time? One died suddenly without any warning in the SMART data and the other got badblocks and started to struggle reading data.
The data presented in the article only makes sense if you buy a large quantity of hard drives; if you only have had a handful then you were just unlucky.
I suspect the reason why people do "burn in" tests on hard drives is to make drives that suffer from early failure ("infant mortality" as described in the article) fail early enough that you can RMA them with the manufacturer. Apart from that, I don't think there's much you can do to improve your chances.
