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?
Don’t forget to scrub and checksum your drive before making backups. You don’t want to copy over rotten bits.
Same goes for the backup. And the backup’s backup.
What is the process for doing this?
Use a modern filesystem that manages file integrity for you.
I use btrfs.
Lol, so the process is “go back in time and change how you initially formatted the drive”. Come on man.
Good knowledge for setting up new drives though.
Well, sure. If you did it wrong the first time around. For everyone else, just run “btrfs scrub <device>”
how can i do it on ntfs and ext4?
Use btrfs-convert to convert ext4 to btrfs.
NTFS is 31 years old and not modern by any standard. Avoid if you care about your data.