I recommend you start using an S.M.A.R.T. monitoring tool like gSmartControl to verify the health of a disk before just tossing it in the dumpster. I execute a tremendous amount of I/O transactions on my disks -- far more than simply gaming would entail -- and they last for years. Since you should be reformatting at least once per year, that's a disgusting rate of usage -- either you're wasting hard drives en masse, you're not reformatted nearly often enough to keep your system running smoothly, or you're buying some extremely shoddy hardware made in somebody's basement with tinfoil and duct tape.

Of course, if you have the money then you may as well burn it freely I suppose. Government organizations throw them away like used toothpicks. Sure, they're made using extremely rare earth metals that are found almost exclusively in China alone, but we may as well change them like socks.