This does not mean that your drive will fail at 2.5 years on average.
In fact, something closer to the data we need are buried deeper in the article: the annualized failure rate data. The average annualized failure rate is 1.4%.
We don't know the distribution of failure times, but for comparison, if the risk of failure was constant over time and thus the lifetime of a hard drive was exponentially distributed, this would correspond to an average lifetime of 70 years.