IMO cooling should be mandatory for HDs

I'm not saying that heat is the single cause of drive death, but I am willing to bet in many cases that heat was indeed the factor in a drive's death when it was thought to be defective.
Since 10 years ago virtually all of those HDs that I did not have a fan on died within 2 years. For the past 3 years I've been using those dual slim fans that screw onto the belly of the drive and I've not had a single drive die on me yet.

I agree, I had a drive temporarily stop working because it overheated. I've used active cooling on all my 7200 RPM drives since then. My current rig has 2 80mm fans together in 2 5" bays to cool my 2 disks. Those single 5" bay coolers are junk.

-Rav

I have a fan pushing air across my two drives, I just feel so much better when they are kept cool because they can really get pretty warm.

I have an 80mm fan in the drive bay with my Maxtor, its cool to the toch after runnin 24/7

my friend has the same exact drive in his case with no cooling on it,, and it runs real warm

u can take his drive out and lay it on the table for 30 min, and compair it to my drive thats currently runnin, and mine still feels cooler =)

and his drive is also ALOT louder

and mines older with more use