ageka, your friend's advice is sound and technically accurate. Very few harddrive failures happen suddenly during operation - you boot up one morning and discover that Windows won't load. When you consider that hard drives run between 7200-15000 rpm's, you can imagine the kind of stresses which the moving parts face. Then again, startup failure is characteristic of almost all hardware failures, save those related to heat buildup.
There's a lot of great advice in this thread. I find it encouraging that I can join a totally non-computer-related forum and find so many savvy members.