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> Does anybody actually want hard drives this old?

Sure, I would! I frequently use hard drives much older than this, and while I know there's an increased risk of failure, it has never happened to me -- so that risk appears to be quite tiny.

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Take a look at how failure rates dramatically accelerate once you hit 5 years:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/

The risk is anything but tiny.

"How long do drives last? It would appear a reasonable estimate of the median life expectancy is six years and nine months."

I'm not questioning those statistics, really. Nonetheless I'll continue to go with my own experience on this. I typically have hard drives in use for 7-10 years or so before replacing them for something with higher capacity. This has never caused any issue. And when I replace a hard drive, I keep the old one in storage as an extra backup. I've copied data off of 20+ year old drives from storage without a problem before (although that's a bit different than using them daily).

In any case, should a hard drive fail, it's not of great significance because of redundancy and backups. Also, spinning platter drives usually give plenty of warning of impending failures.

Used hard drives remain very attractive to me.

It is wild how many failure rates coincide with warranty.

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