My primary home zfs server is from 2010, running 24x7 since then. It has a 4-way mirror zfs pool for data. Over the years I have replaced two of the four drives, so two are still original from 2010. Everything else on the machine is from 2010.

You can get unlucky and have components fail quickly, but usually if they last, they'll last for a long time.

But trying to run a server from an SD card like in the article, seems silly. False economy, just get a good SSD.

For drive health monitoring there is SMART, but IME while it does monitor drive usage and lifetime, it rarely predicts catastrophic failure since that happens suddenly. Both drives that failed in this system went from healthy (according to SMART) to unresponsive overnight.