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?
I had a drive fail two days after purchase. I had just copied all my data to it and erased my primary drive to copy everything back and clean it up. I spent (rather, my father spent (I was barely an adult and he helped me out)) ~$3000 for data recovery) to get everything back. Despite recovery, the experience caused me depression at how fragile my digital life was.
Storage is comparatively cheap compared to at that time. I was depressed because I was young and not making much money and storage was expensive. I could hardly afford to pay to protect my data. It’s much easier to do so now.
Have multiple backups. Have one be offsite in case of natural disaster. I mailed an external drive of all the music I’d made on my computer to a family member in another state. Cover your ass.
If you can afford to eat out on occasion, you can save enough to protect your data. Backblaze is currently $9 / month. It’s stupid-cheap. An external disk and some open source backup software is stupid-cheap. Run both and you have your data in three places: source, external, cloud.