So after nearly 5 years of faithful service, my PC's old harddrive began to fail significantly with each passing day (failure to be recognized at startup, disk read errors upon startup becoming more and more frequent, programs stuttering and freezing occasionally when being open, some files ending up corrupted etc.), and after performing an analysis it became clear to me that I need a replacement ASAP, lest I suffer a complete loss of important stuff. Thankfully, a friend helped me out with purchase of a new harddrive (Western Digital Blue 1TB drive), which was finally installed today and we were able to salvage most important data from the old one. Only downside is having to reinstall -everything- one has been using up to that point, but that's what we have to deal with when it comes to computers....

RIP Hitachi Deskstar, you served me well.