Looking for Samsung Story Station 1TB repair

I paid $90 for a 1TB HDD that just failed, and it's still under the three-year limited warranty.

It held around 100 gig or so of music and written works; CDs and things that would be very difficult to replace. My question:

Is it cheaper to go through with the warranty, get a new drive from Samsung, lose my data and risk it happening again or have the drive taken apart, void my warranty, and possibly save the data? I would then re-purchase the CDs and download what I could, rewrite what papers I could.

I plugged it in one day, and it smoked; I'm thinking a resistor blew, or something simple happened, but I smell burning on it, and it still lights up, it's just not spinning at all.

I've considered freezing it; I've heard that when the components are cold, they could contract, and they disc head may spin, I'm just afraid it would take too long to transfer and it would warm up; couldn't tell you my Net speeds, but it took an hour or two to transfer onto the drive from my still-functioning Western Digital Passport...granted, that was on campus, I think. At home I don't need to throttle the speeds.

I've got CDs, vinyl, books, and personal essays on the drive. If it's disassembled, Samsung's going to be stupid and void my warranty, but I've also read that popping the drive into a PC could make it work long enough to copy over onto a backup.

I don't want to spend excess money, obviously, but the contents are important to me. What do the IT techs here think I should do? I'm willing to pay someone to get the stuff for me, and if you can do it discretely so the drive looks untouched, I'd be doubly pleased, since I could just return the damn thing to Samsung.

Sigh. Rant over. Please feel free to PM if you think you can help, and Merry Christmas.