Its no secret the hard drives die. It is one of the most common failures in computers, probably only second to fans. The main reason being heat and moving parts. Most people may think this failure is eminent, and no way to prevent it. I respectfully disagree. There are two main areas that need addressed when trying to prevent hard drive failure:

1. Heat - when a hard drive gets hot, performance is degraded, and continues to do so the more it is worked.
2. Read/Writes - the more read/writes a hard drive does, the more it is worked, accumulating heat and increasing wear on the mechanical parts.

 Solution: - If the hard drive is in a laptop, or small form factor case, there isn't much one can do to help with heat, it's just poor design from the manufacturers. However, if it is an internal drive on a desktop, or an external drive in an enclosure there are some steps you can take to help keep your drive cool. 

1. Add fans - most well designed cases have place to mount a fan at the front of the case, although most don't come with one installed. Additionally, a hard drive cooler is the best option, it mounts directly to the bottom of the hard drive, or some designs mount the drive in a 5.25" drive bay (cd/dvd rom bay) with small fans in the front. I personally use hard drive coolers that mount to the bottom of a hard drive, and see results from 20 - 30 degrees (Fahrenheit) difference. For external drives, check the enclosure type, some are all aluminum which dissipates the heat very well, while others are plastic on the inside. I can only speculate, but I suspect companies were getting complaints of how hot their enclosures (all aluminum) get when using the external drive, and this lead manufacturers to line the enclosures with plastic, acting as insulation. Bad for you, good for them. (more hard drives sold this way)
2. Add Ram - computers perform a process known as "paging", in other words, temporarily writing information to a hard disk drive instead of RAM. This happens when the RAM has already been allocated or is approaching thresholds limitations. Paging causes continual use of the hard drive, causing more heat, and more chances for failure. Disk thrashing is the term to discribe what happens when a hard drive is bombarded with read/writes. The best way to prevent this is to have more than enough memory (RAM) in your computer and prevent paging altogether. You can never have too much RAM, in fact if your computer has enough, you can even turn paging off completely.

 Summary: We can extend the life of hard drives by adding RAM, and keeping the drive cool. Solid state drives are susceptible to the read/writes issues since they can wear out after so many uses, but its not as important to keep them cool.