The service life of hard drives, like many things, is dependent on how they're used.
Particular to a notebook drive, duty cycle is one item of concern. These drives are not designed for 24/7 operation, and if a machine is left running for ages (downloading torrents, say), then this puts loads of stress on the hard drive. By their nature, these drives are constantly loading and unloading the heads after a certain interval (usually between 5 and 15 seconds after idle, regardless of computer power settings). So they'll incur more wear in a shorter time than a desktop designed more for constant operation, or a notebook used a couple of hours each day and then put to sleep or shut down.
Anyway, 2 years is an average service life for the 2002/3-era drives with high mileage. I've never been a huge Toshiba fan, but haven't noticed any massive failure trends. Most iBooks are typically associated with failure of the GPU or power subsystem (which is mostly Apple's fault) than with disk failure (which is the drive manufacturer's fault).
Particular to a notebook drive, duty cycle is one item of concern. These drives are not designed for 24/7 operation, and if a machine is left running for ages (downloading torrents, say), then this puts loads of stress on the hard drive. By their nature, these drives are constantly loading and unloading the heads after a certain interval (usually between 5 and 15 seconds after idle, regardless of computer power settings). So they'll incur more wear in a shorter time than a desktop designed more for constant operation, or a notebook used a couple of hours each day and then put to sleep or shut down.
Anyway, 2 years is an average service life for the 2002/3-era drives with high mileage. I've never been a huge Toshiba fan, but haven't noticed any massive failure trends. Most iBooks are typically associated with failure of the GPU or power subsystem (which is mostly Apple's fault) than with disk failure (which is the drive manufacturer's fault).