Harmy said:
Do you think it could really predict that the HDD would die two years later, where one day it was working perfectly fine and the next day, it was dead?
And well, it actually isn't completely dead, you can still browse through it and see all the files and they even start copying when you try but it's going super slowly and in a couple of minutes you get a "can't read file" error message. And it makes these terrible noises. I think the spinning mechanism is broken.
Predict a mechanical part breaking? No. But there's plenty that can be discovered with it that might not come up for a year or so, since often there can be bad sectors far enough into the disk that it takes a while to actually get to in general use, but once you do get there, all hell breaks loose.
Oh, and at the stage it is in now, if there actually is anything you need to get off of it, you can wrap the drive in something (to keep moisture off) and toss it in a fridge for a few hours. That tends to get the drive working for a short period, in which you can get some files off of it, or at least generate a list of what was on it, so you know what's missing.