You were just lucky. I have seen plenty of old Seagate or WD HDDs failing. In a few cases that was just a couple of months after the expiry of their warranties

You were just lucky. I have seen plenty of old Seagate or WD HDDs failing. In a few cases that was just a couple of months after the expiry of their warranties. In some cases the motors failed, in other cases they began to show very frequently bad sectors. These were among the almost one hundred HDDs that I have used in my personal computers during a few decades. Judging from your tiny 256 GB HDD, you might have mostly used small HDDs, which are more robust. I have typically used only the models with the largest capacity of each series, which are more prone to failures, due to having more disks (i.e. a heavier load for both the motor of the disks and for the coil actuator of the head assembly) and with narrower spacings. Before switching to magnetic tapes, I have used many HDDs for backup and archival purposes. After such HDDs have been kept in cold storage for a few years, few of them did not have any corrupt file. However, I have always kept duplicates for each archival HDD and even when both HDDs had a few errors, they were not in the same place, so I have never lost any archived data. The files were stored with hashes, which caught some cases when the HDD had read the file without apparent errors, but the file was corrupt despite that.