Anecdote here. I had an ~8 years old 500GB Western Digital hard disk which spent the last 3-4 years on a shelf and when I tried to reuse it, after 2-3 uneventfu

Anecdote here. I had an ~8 years old 500GB Western Digital hard disk which spent the last 3-4 years on a shelf and when I tried to reuse it, after 2-3 uneventful months, it started to "refuse" to spin up at boot time and, after several seconds of retrials, BIOS would print the classic "boot failure" message. Sometimes it would spin up after several reboots but after a while it refused to spin up at all so, after a quick google, I got to the "freezer" method and to my surprise it worked. After being left in the freezer for ~1 hour (wrapped in plastic) it spun up instantly and functioned normally, long enough to make a backup of some not very valuable files from it (after ~8 years, I was expecting failures). So "freezer method" could work as a measure of last resort.