Hard Drive Crash!

Megan called me the other day to tell me she heard a clicking/chirping sound coming from the computer. The screen went black and wouldn't respond. A hard drive had died, but the question was, "which one?"
My system had two hard drives cannibalized from my old computer to save money. They were both about 2 years old. A 160GB drive housed Windows XP and applications, while the larger 200GB one served as storage for photos, videos, and documents. If the Windows drive had crashed, it meant the headache of reinstalling windows, but that all our personal media escaped unscathed. It turned out that the larger media drive had gone to the big drive bay in the sky. Fortunately, I had a Perl script backing up all our personal data nightly to the main drive.
I started grumbling and searching online for a replacement that I hadn't budgeted for. I vacillated between buying a sub $50 drive around 160GB -- smaller than I wanted, or springing for a larger 500GB drive for around $100. The larger drive was a better value, but neither option seemed to suit me. Growing up in an entitlement generation, I wanted more for less. Out of curiosity, I surfed over to the Seagate website since the remembered the drive having a five year warranty. I was surprised when I put in the serial number and it showed the drive being warrantied until 2011 -- 7 years from the time I bought it.
I filled out the online form and snickered at the option to upgrade my replacement to a 250GB model for $40 more. Nice try, Seagate, but I'll take the free replacement, thank you.
I felt a little hesitant that I couldn't erase the data on the dead drive. If it was refurbished, could our personal data be exposed to prying eyes? I decided it was a long shot, and couldn't think of anything too compromising if this did happen.
A week went by and, to my delight, I received a 250GB (refurbished) drive as a replacement. This was the upgrade they initially offered to charge me for. I snubbed my nose at "the man," and popped my free upgrade into our system. After a night of copying back the data, we were back in business. Crisis averted.