Hard drive damaged - replace it myself?

My computer crashed the other day, and a technician came over and after it wouldn't mount on his computer, and made some awful noises trying to start up, he declared the hard disk dead. I live in Costa Rica, so getting service is a pain. The tech offered to sell me a new WD Scorpio 2.5" 320Gb SATA hard drive for $190, and do a "complete installation and configuration" of the drive and system for another $150. I found the DIY guide for replacing the hard drive, and it looks simple enough. My question is, given the damaged drive, is there any risk in replacing the drive myself? Any reason to pay the tech to do it for me?
Thanks

It comes form my experience in the computer repair/computer service industry. There have been many times where I've seen WD OEM (original electronic manufacturer) or Retail drives fail. At my particular store we only carry SeaGate & WD internals hard drives (on occasion we have Maxtor too, but they're a rebranded low quality SeaGate); it seems to be much more frequent that I have my clients coming back in 2-7 months saying "My computer isn't working again" and more often than not testing shows the hard drive to be bad. Most of the time these hard drives are WD. That doesn't mean that SeaGate drives don't fail, but I see it much less often.
Because of things like this WD has made me (& my team) look like we don't know what we're doing. As a result, I encourage SeaGate & Hitachi drives due to their higher quality. Everyone has an opinion though and I'm sure there are good WD drives out there. They just don't seem to be as frequent in my experience. In addition, a lot of manufacturers buy & use WD drives due to their (typically) lower price point. One of my coworkers recently bought a WD external about 4 months ago. It failed on him & while WD gladly replaced the drive, that doesn't help him get his data back. He's a graphic design student & had literally thousands of pictures. WD wanted to charge him $1000+ to send the drive out to a disaster recovery center (which is a common price); but it was still within their 3-year warranty...
I guess my experience has just left a super-bad taste in my mouth with WD. That being said, I still prefer WD over Maxtor drives. I don't what SeaGate says about their quality, they seem to be the cheap-brand cola compared to Coke/Pepsi.
SeaGate or Hitachi > WD > Maxtor
/END RANT; sorry if I hijacked the thread, lol.

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