Question: is it possible to test a hard disk and predict when it will die on you (roughly)?

Answer: While @Alex Howansky’s answer made me chuckle endlessly, I think what you’re really looking for is something like SMART diagnostic data, which is a predictive failure tool. ?Any modern drive that supports it will WARN you if it thinks something is wrong based on a pattern of small failures…major head crashes are still basically impossible to predict, though.