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I'm glad to say that's similar to what I'm getting overall. Many fail in the first few months, then there's the occasional one and then after 3 years, it starts getting hairy.

My rig that I built back in 2007 will turn 6 years old next month. It still has the 2 original HD's. The boot one is a 75 gig Seagate running at 10k, and the other is another Seagate running at 7500 (sorry I don't have the exact model numbers). When they hit 4 years of age, I've been using SpinRite option #4 to recondition the drive once a year. Never lost any data and the drives don't make any noise.

How long they last depends on care just as well. I bought four drives back in 2008, almost 5 years since then. two bit the dust in the first 6 months, while the other two are still running like champs.

If using drives in Raid, the biggest determination on lifetime is heat. The better you cool them and the more they are spaced out, enables them to last longer. The manufacturing process can mean a lot too.

I ordered four 750GB Seagates back in 2007, one arrived DOA, which was replaced, and the other three failed within two years. Meanwhile the DOA replacement has been running fine ever since.

Heat supposedly doesn't really factor in per Google's analyses.

For drive life, I'm proud my servers OS drive is a 20gb Seagate that I've had since the mid 90's. It's ran 24/7 for the last 3 years and had a full life before it hit the server.

I honestly don't ever recall any of my HDDs failing. My 1 TB HDD is at least 5 yrs old. Those in several of our laptops are even older. We have even older PCs at work, no problems.

I'm hoping my SSDs last forever too, or until I opt to upgrade to others someday.
I did have one newer SSD fail when fairly new but it was still under warranty and wasn't used for anything but games so wasn't a big deal.

Well, Google does have a better budget than most to handle heat-related concerns, unlike the average user. Try stacking six hard drives with inadequate cooling then run them 24/7. You'll see noticeably different results.

Laptop hard drives have different results. Mostly due to how different people them, and overheating when people block the vents. The older laptop ATA drives have mixed results, most reliable ones seeming to be the Seagate and Toshiba ones from my experience.

Currently has a dual hard drive system in my laptop. Main drive is a OCZ Vertex 4 and storage drive is a Toshiba. Good results and handles quite well. I have noticed the SSD drive runs much hotter. One wouldn't really expect that. There doesn't seem to be a temp sensor, so I could only test external temp at best, but it is noticeably hotter to the touch.

As I've noted in other threads, I've had quite a few drives fail for either me or friends in my time. 20 at least. And I can't say that there are any particular reasons for them failing. Some were very well cooled and some were packed like bricks together. I currently have my server's drives packed like bricks. They get hot enough that it's uncomfortable to touch, but they've been going fine for years. The only thing that I'm confident in is that hard drives don't take well to physical shock when running.

This is true, nor do they take well to being improperly shut off, turned on, shut off type of thing.