I haven't had many, if any, HDD failures w/in 1st 5-or-so years of purchase either (whether for home or work over ~3 decades).
The few failures I've had either far exceeded 5 years of regular usage or was maybe left unused too long -- seems leaving an HDD unused too long can be an issue as well. Running into very sporadic bad sectors or the like does happen of course, but very rarely catastrophic failures otherwise, except as indicated.
But I haven't used any HDDs for Time Machine (and whatever Apple backups) since I'm not a Mac guy...
In recent years, I've completely migrated away from HDD usage outside of my modest, Synology RAID NAS. Guess might be about time to get new HDDs to replace the 6-plus-yo drives in that NAS... although maybe I should (again consider) just upgrade the entire unit to something bigger and better...
_Man_
The few failures I've had either far exceeded 5 years of regular usage or was maybe left unused too long -- seems leaving an HDD unused too long can be an issue as well. Running into very sporadic bad sectors or the like does happen of course, but very rarely catastrophic failures otherwise, except as indicated.
But I haven't used any HDDs for Time Machine (and whatever Apple backups) since I'm not a Mac guy...
In recent years, I've completely migrated away from HDD usage outside of my modest, Synology RAID NAS. Guess might be about time to get new HDDs to replace the 6-plus-yo drives in that NAS... although maybe I should (again consider) just upgrade the entire unit to something bigger and better...
_Man_