I didn’t remember when I bought this hard drive (I thought 2004). It was an HP product with an unalterable HP partition, designed for Windows backups. Which I probably never used it for. That was a bother, but even more of a bother was my trying to overwrite the disk so I could give it away. My command-line Linux magic simply rendered it unusable, unmountable, impossible to format in Linux or MacOS.
So, impossible to erase. All my data still on there.
However, that raises a question:
Short answer: That being said, if you just want a quick rule of thumb for how long you can expect the hard drive in your laptop should last, we’d say you should be prepared for disk failure after three years of use. source
Of course, this was not in constant use. But, at 13 years and four months, it is now retired. And my data safe.
