BTW, please don't take any of this personally (and thank you for striving to do right!)

The most upvoted answer on the edited question by @cybernard talks extensively about SMART which is a red herring. The original question made it clear the original poster was only interested in ongoing degradation (digital decay) and not mechanical failure. Removing this, and his following paragraph which shows confusion about digital decay and disk longevity altered the nature and focus of the post in a way which I believe obscured the question intent and encouraged irrelevant answers.

Unfortunately questions about electronics arw off topic at Superuser.com