It depends on the warranty period of the drive. Your hard drive manufacturer knows precisely how long the drive will last and sets their warranty period to expire right before your drive gives up the ghost.
Yeah, if that was true that would be completely against EU regulations,so you could sue manufacturers and win millions. So if you have any proof that they are doing that, you are practically a millionaire, I don't know why are you not on your way to the court yet.
How so? That is how warrantees work. They're designed to protect you against premature failure. Unless it's a necessary competitive advantage no company is going to warrantee something past its expected lifetime. And in that case it's going to be included in the price.
Designing a device to fail after a pre-determined amount is very much against the law. Expected lifetime is different, but this is not what the previous poster was suggesting.
The manufacturer has some good information about the statistical likelihood of your drive failing within a certain time period and tunes the warranty accordingly. They do not know exactly when your specific drive will fail as this would require some form of time travel.