Just for the sake of titillation, this is the oldest drive. I still have running on that server:

I’m pretty sure that this drive and the two other drives, which are in similarly terrible condition, could simply just die at any moment
And I am so poor, that I could, of course, not afford to replace any of them, especially considering hard drive prices at the moment.
Edit: if you know how to read Smart status output, you can clearly see that this hard drive is, for all intense and purposes, already quite dead. It’s a fucking miracle. I can read any data off of it at all. But it chugs along, as if it was brand new. Bless fucking Seagate.
SEAGATE EXOS ENTERPRISE. SHELL OUT THOSE DOLLARS ON THE FRONT END AND NEVER LOOK BACK.
Not just my server, but I have set up and can attest to the integrity of at least six other Plex servers that are a similar vintage to mine that live on safe and sound
In my 45+ years of computery, i’ve never known a hard drive quite like the Seagate EXOS. Expensive as fuck, but quite invincible.
Edit: *under normal operating conditions. If it gets a little too hot, that shit will melt. Like any enterprise hardware, you gotta keep your eye very carefully on its operating temperature. I have known a situation or two wherein a drivebox overheated, causing drives to fail. But that was a USER error, NOT a hardware failure. But this is 2026, not 1986, so you’re gonna get plenty of system warnings before you get to that point.
But if everything is properly monitored and cared for, it will operate perfectly for an extra extraordinarily long time, and it will do so perfectly.