He didn't have a raid array on his laptop, that would have saved him as well, with not even a second worth of data lost.

And he could use his system without replacing any drive and he would have had a much quicker recovery and could have used the system during rebuild.

Now, raid on a laptop is mostly reserved to bigger units. And authors setup is awesome as well, but single drive failure is one of the most common issues (especially where you make use of snapshots) you need your backup and that is exactly what raid solves.

So try to do both :)