My 2006 iPod Classic hit 4,000 days of runtime on a drive that should've died in 2011
I ran a SMART check on the original 80GB Toshiba drive in my 2006 iPod Classic and it reported 4,000 power-on days, which doesn't add up to the 14 years I've been using it unless you count every time I left it in a glovebox in Phoenix. The drive should've failed around 2011 based on the old failure rates people used to throw around on forums, but it's still spinning and syncing over the old 30-pin cable. I only replaced the battery once, back in 2015, and the click wheel still works even after two drops on concrete. Is there any real way to predict when a spinning drive actually dies, or is it all just luck and heat at this point?
Old drives like that just keep going when they stay cool and get used steady instead of sitting idle for months. Heat is the real killer, so that Phoenix glovebox probably baked the bearings worse than any normal use ever could, yet it's still here. At this point you just run it till it makes noise, then swap in a flash card and stop worrying about it.