I still have the original server that started garlic.com in production after 11+ years so I know servers can last a long time. I don't understand why Akamai failure rates are so high
Applications which cause the disk to thrash will wear out disk drives much more quickly than non-thrashing applications. When I still ran USENET news servers back before cyclic file systems were used, I remember that their hard drives died frequently, often after less than a year of service, but those drives were thrashing 24 by 7. You can hear drives thrashing and feel it by touching the case. It is caused by almost completely random access resulting in almost constant head movement. It is cost effective to just thrash cheap drives and replace them when they die. --Michael Dillon