I've just had my second HDD failure since I bought this machine (or maybe shortly before, I forget). Fortunately both failed drives were external backup drives and not /home or /, but I'm rather annoyed.
More worrying is that my machine seems to have hung completely due to the drive failure (a backup was being performed when the drive failed). The last system log entries were drive failure notifications during the backup (shortly after I left for work), and I found the machine unresponsive to both keyboard/mouse input and ssh when I got home tonight. It booted without issue when power cycled. Given that the system does not depend on any files on that drive and it is, so to speak, "write only" in normal operation, there's really no reason the drive failure should have caused a kernel hang, which makes me suspect a kernel bug.