re: IRS computers crashed 10 days after House committee sent letter asking...

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Hard drives have a median lifespan of about 6 years.

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I've seen the Backblaze article too and there are some problems with it in this scenario.

1. Those drives were used 24/7 as part of a server environment.

2. Their data only goes for 4 years, the 5th and 6th years are estimates based on the previous 4 years.

From my personal experience with regular business users, hard drives crashing are a rare bird. Even more rare is it when the crash is so severe that data can't be recovered by specialists. With our 600-700 users, it's not uncommon for hard drives to last the entire time we have the computer (we try to rotate them out every 5 years, but often the budget ends up having us extend it to 7 years and sometimes up to 10).