I had the same thing two nights ago... lost a 120Gb drive mostly filled with copies of programs, drivers etc but there's a lot of documents on there which are pretty much irreplaceable. The "back up everything" mantra is all very well and good except when you have about 2,500Gb of data it's a bit expensive to have duplicates of everything.
It's only the PCB which died though. The platters should all be OK so hopefully I can still salvage everything that was on it because if not, it's goneskis. I can't bring myself to pay $500+ for 'professional' recovery.
Luckily it wasn't my music drive *phew*
I'll be backing that one up on the weekend.