“I have NEVER had a hard drive failure on a desktop at home or at work in over 30 years of computing.”
Well, I am not talking about total failures. I’m really talking about the multiplying problem of bad sectors, which gets worse as the capacity of the drive increases. More bad sectors = higher probability one of those bad sectors will affect a system file = more chance the drive won’t boot.
As long as it can still boot, most people won’t notice much of a problem, just the occasion prompt to run scandisk, but the problem is definitely worse with high capacity drives than the older ones.
I did have a HDD failure on my computer (Win Vista) a few years ago, had to install a whole new HDD and on that I installed Ubuntu.