My home desktop is a 7 yo dell that just this morning crunked the main hard drive (the one with the OS and grub). It only boots if I open the case and tap the drive with a hammer to get it spinning. Everything is backed up to a server (an 11 yo Dell running OpenSuSE 11.3) so I haven't lost any data. I would just get another computer, but I'm moving to San Diego and our house is under contract and we're thankfully only losing $20,000 on the deal (just cleared appraisal, yay!). As it happens, just this afternoon I put 3 hard drives in my Amazon basket of about this total capacity, along with a PCI SATA controller. It's crazy random coincidence so I will happily send you my crunked drive to inspect if you want to verify my claim (maybe after I try to wipe it though -- I think there are some crypto keys on there).
Anyway, look forward to finding out how this goes. Good on you for the effort. Cheers.
edit: thanks to whomever gave the upvote.