No drive failures here. i got a Seagate Momentus 80gb drive with a 5 yr warranty. So I'm confident that I'll get a long time out of it.
I still have an old Travelstar 6gb that works. The only reason i replaced it was because it was a bit noisey and a bit too slow (4200 rpm).
I don't know if the MPC would give an error message if a hard drive fails or not, since i havent run into that problem.
But anyway, are you having problems with your hard drive at all?
If so, what are the symptoms?