With increased usage of hard drives on things like YouTube, movies, TV and such will
the life span be shorter. I had had a rule of thumb say like 5 years then save all data
(with dd) before the HDD goes kaput on a second backup HDD. I know hard drives are getting
larger (I'am using 1 terabyte HDD), however, the very complex mechanisms of the HDD makes
hard to see if it can withstand everyday heavy usage. I would like to see 10 years of heavy
usage on a terabyte hdd with low power consumption and very affordable also very green
on manufacturing, cleaning and recycling. The CPU and the BIOS is another story.

Some clarifications are needed here, I think:
- Youtube, movies and TV are in no way heavy usage for a HDD.
- A HDD can die at any given time, so you should always have a recent backup of your data.

No one can predict how long a specific disk will live, you can only make estimates over the whole series. Your disk can die tomorrow or it can last 20 years, no one can tell you and there is nothing you can do about it. Even simply not using it for a long time can be damaging to the drive.
So just make regular backups and hope the best.

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I'd think it could but the rule of quality is measured usually wrong with a MTBF. If you want good quality then you have to pay for server type of disk. They tend to last better than cheap ones made for home use.

Live TV on MythTV can make extensive use of the hard drive because it records what is being watched (for functions like pause, rewind, etc.). But just watching movies shouldn't use much more hard drive IO than normal desktop use, even if playback is being cached to disk. Like the others said, a hard drive can go at any time. It has moving parts, so they can wear out. Excessive conditions, like heat and/or vibrations, can help kill a drive faster, as it can with any electronics.

Using techniques that are employed to reduce writes to (mostly older) SSDs, could, theoretically, help reduce wear on the drive armature as well. Those are things like mounting with the noatime parameter in the fstab, etc. Will that help?! Who knows. If you consider all HD use like it was mileage on a car, I suppose that would cut down the cumulative wear and tear. I don't think you can equate hard drive wear and tear against that on a car, though.

And as far as performance... I suppose if the drive is doing as less housekeeping work, it could be more responsive for reading/writing for video recording or playback,... But I don't think you'd notice a difference. However, making the fstab changes can't really hurt the drive or your data, either.

SSDs still have problems with repeated writes to the memory cells and over time after so many writes and rewrites to areas they simply breakdown.

I'd say HDDs are going to still last longer, but yes always have backups. I've had a few drives last about 5+ years with my longest still working hard drive being an old PATA-100 30GB Western Digital HDD. 9 years and every check I perform each year still comes out clean.

With modern wear-leveling and more modern SSD chips, the MTBF (mean time between failure) for an HD and that of a SSD are about equivalent. I have had a hard drive go after 6 mos. use... I haven't had a SSD or flash drive go yet...

The average lifespan of a hard drive is approx. 6 years, from what I remember. That's roughly equivalent to a modern SSD drive.
That said, you should reduce unnecessary writes to an SSD,...