dont forget *everything* fails.
Do people forget the electromechanical nature of drives?
Do users treat them appropriately? In the correct environment? Cooling? (not too cool by the way!)
Do they handle them correctly? ESD wise? Shock wise? Storage wise?
Do they use the right drive in the right application?
Based on the sob stories above (actually every time a HDD piece is published on el reg), the answer would have to be NO.
HDD technology is pretty amazing and no wonder it sometimes fails, especially when they are mistreated/misused, but I suppose users would never blame themselves for any drive failures, ever.
And that list in the article is very misleading - a useless statistically invalid dataset masquerading as useful information. You only have to look at the storageboxes the blogger is recommending and the inappropriate drives he is using for such chassis' to see the source is invalid.
El Reg should have spotted how poor the article is a mile away.