Is this not already the mindset? I worked at a data storage company for a while; everyone knew hard drives fail, because we had so many disks we would have a couple failures just about every day. Everything was designed to be fault-tolerant so we could squeeze the most life out of every spindle, but in the absence of fault-tolerance I'm sure we would have had a spindle retiring schedule.

Are there many companies that do not acknowledge this basic fact of operation?