Dying Maxtor (now owned by Seagate) hard disk

Though it took some searching I finally found the form to check the warranty status for a Maxtor drive I had purchased. The bad news is that the drive is no longer under warranty. I suppose I've had the drive longer than a year though I will check to be sure. In any case it says the warranty expired in July 2007 so I wasn't even close. The drive is a Maxtor DiamondMax 11 500GB and I have to say I'm disappointed that it has died so soon since it is mostly a storage and backup drive and is therefore not used (powered on) very frequently. I'm not sure if there are any other usage factors that would have contributed to it's quick demise but if there are I wish I knew what they were so that they could be mitigated.