Hi Ralphie.
You should take your hard drive out of cold storage occasionally and spin it up to make sure it still works. Someone in another forum recently has been saying that of all the (many, with audio files on them) drives that he had on the shelf long-term, a few have failed and the failure mode in every case was totally dead on power up.

Older hard disks had spindle lubricants that could set solid if they weren't used for a long time; modern drives are less prone to sticking like that, but even so it's worth checking...

Needless to say, Ralphie is spot-on about CDs.

Anahata