It appears to work fine (it contains my home partition for my main machine I daily drive) and I haven’t noticed signs of failure. Not noticeably slow either. I used to boot Windows off of it once upon a time which was incredibly slow to start up, but I haven’t noticed slowness since using it for my home partition for my personal files.
Articles online seem to suggest the life expectancy for an HDD is 5–7 years. Should I be worried? How do I know when to get a new drive?
If you’re not seeing anything of concern in the SMART info then there’s little to worry about. You could install/run smartctl from the command line, or for something with a gui try gsmartcontrol / any other app that can interact with your hard drive diagnostics.
Hard drives can last a long time, as a general rule if your hard drive made it through its first 1-2 years without issue then there’s a good chance it’ll keep chugging along for years. I personally haven’t found that hard drives consistently die in 5-7 years, not too sure where you got that info from.
In any case backups are your friend, not just in case the hard drive dies but there’s always the possibility that your entire OS blows up somehow or you get a bad case of malware.