I keep hearing people say that hard drives won’t last long and to always have backups. But if it is like that, that means you would have to be buying drives consistently? Has anyone ever had a hard drive work for them successfully for a decade or even more where they wouldn’t have to be buying more?
The drives do not have any expiration data and etc. They just work until the failure, so some of them can work for 10+ years, some of them can fail in a few weeks. It is more about luck and, I think, workload.
You want to have backups with any drive, if the data is critical to you and you do not want to lose it.