I think he’s just hoping against hope that once Trump is president again (ew, no) that he’ll be taken care of… even though Trump has a proven track record of fucking over his toadies.
I just replaced a drive today that has been running 24/7 for the last 5.18 years. It hadn’t failed yet but was in a predictive failure state due to the amount of bad sectors it has accumulated. 3 other disks in the same giant raid array are showing some bad sectors but not enough to be over the ‘replace me now’ threshold.
I want to believe.