If you avoid QLC drives, keep it at a reasonable temperature, and don’t use a drive that’s had a large number of write cycles, it will be fine for a year.
Sounds reasonable. Maybe even use SLC, some enterprise grade SSDs still offer that.
When hard drives get older, sometimes they will just refuse to spin up after sitting for a long time.
True. I would recommend to replace them after 5 years or if they're frequently in use, after 35000 hours, whichever comes first.