On the Seagate Hard Drive Replacement Program...

So it turns out the 27" iMac I own is part of the "Seagate Hard Drive Replacement Program" as it was produced in 2010.

I brought my iMac in for service right before the Holiday season last year, but was told that there was a bit of a backlog, and it would take up to 14 days for them to service my computer. No sense in waiting, I figured, because at the time there was still over four months left on the program, and there were no problems with my iMac that I could see.

Well, we're roughly 18 days away from the end of the program, so now I need to decide if I'm bringing it in or not.

I've used the thing daily for almost three years now and I haven't had any issues with it. If I had a bum hard drive, shouldn't it have gone out by now?

I'm worried that in the process of them opening the computer to replace the hard drive, something may go awry, such as dust behind the glass, a damaged LCD, or something else internally I wouldn't know about. Since I haven't had any issues, should I just forgo the replacement and use the computer until it's natural end-of-life? What are you thoughts on this?

Secondly, if I do decide to bring the computer in, I assume I'll receive it with a completely blank hard drive. I have a time machine backup going, and I'll likely make a complete disk image on a separate external HDD I have as a second backup, so that's not a problem. However, since the hard drive will be blank, there won't be a recovery partition. Should I dig out my iMac's restore DVD (If I can find it) or should I make a Lion Restore DVD before I bring the computer in for service and reinstall from that? (Then restore from Time Machine)

Thanks for any tips you can pass along.