It appears to work fine (it contains my home partition for my main machine I daily drive) and I haven’t noticed signs of failure. Not noticeably slow either. I used to boot Windows off of it once upon a time which was incredibly slow to start up, but I haven’t noticed slowness since using it for my home partition for my personal files.
Articles online seem to suggest the life expectancy for an HDD is 5–7 years. Should I be worried? How do I know when to get a new drive?
The majority of HDD failures happen in the first 1-2 years (see Backblaze data). I have a NAS that has the same 5 drives running since 2013 and in all that time those disks were not spinning for maybe 3 weeks total.
That said I assume that any drive can fail at any time and anything I don’t want to lose has 2 backup copies, e.g. stuff I am working on on my PC gets copied to that NAS, that in turn backs it up online.
This is actually a good thing for longevity. Start up and stopping is the hardest part of a drive’s life. So you will see more failures on a personal PC that you turn off every night than a server drive running 24/7. Laptop drives will typically fare the worst as they may be power cycled many times a day, often fully stop when idle for power saving and get shaken much more than other drives.