How often do you replace hard drives?

[iviv]

I was just tidying up my case and noticed that one of my HDDs had a manufacture date of 2009 on it, so it's probably been running in there for a good 7 years at this point. Anything important I already have backed up on the cloud, so if the drive dies I wouldn't lose anything vital, though it would be a pain to replace everything in there.

On the one hand, it makes sense to get a replacement drive now and just copy everything over while it works, but equally it could also go another few years without dying, so it would be a waste to replace it now.

So, how often do you replace working drives? Or do you just work them all to death before replacing?

 

[iviv]

What health checks can you use, and how accurate are they? It always seemed to me that a drive would generally just up and die without much warning.

 

[iviv]

Well, I just installed crystaldiskinfo. Weirdly my OS SSD has unknown health status, and one of my HDDs just shows no stats whatsoever. It recognises that the drive exists, but health and temp are both unknown. And my primary gaming drive has almost 56k hours, I think that's the 9 year old one now.