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I've had my 80GB Ipod Classic for about six years.  Not sure exactly when I got it, but it would appear from the model number that they only made this particular one in 2007/8, and that seems about right.

Playing some music through my Blu-ray player last night while family was over and it just froze up the whole system.  Ipod froze, Blu-ray froze.  I unhooked the ipod and unplugged the Blu-ray, plugged the BR back in and it worked again.  The ipod, however, didn't.  Plugged it in to my laptop and it wasn't recognized.  It didn't seem to be charging either so I figured it was either the battery or the hard drive.  Can't test the battery but you can test the hard drive.  Diagnostic mode found using this excellent post by someone calling themselves turingtest2

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3784647?start=0&tstart=0.

Ran the diagnostics and everything seemed OK.  Weird but restarted it again and now it works fine.

My guess is that the hard drive is starting to act up.  Several resets may have taken care of the problem, or maybe the diagnostics reset some stuff in the OS.  Either way, I guess I'd better be prepared.  Six years is not too bad a lifespan for an electronic item and now it looks like I'll get a bit longer, but need to start thinking about the options. 

I just put a 64GB memory card in my phone but I'm not sure how fast the read access is for playing music.  The battery life on the phone also isn't so great but I have spare batteries.  I'm also not thrilled with playing music through a computer or stereo using the headphone jack.  You just don't get the same volume or quality of music as through Apple's data jack.  I use the phone in the car all the time for podcasts and I have to crank both the phone and car audio volumes to get a reasonable level.  Not so bad if I am just listening to music through headphones but...