What's the shortest amount of time before you have had a failure from a recently installed hard drive?

We installed a new drive probably less than six months ago and about two weeks back it started showing bad sectors which just got worse. It was a data drive only for pics and docs, no program files. Now I have it with a friend seeing what he can recover for me.

Less than 6 months out of a new (quality brand) drive...not impressed. The one we put in the tower when we built the system 4 years ago is still running fine. Go figure!