Arny, I think you analogy is incorrect. Yes, CPUs and hard drives especially
the 7200 RPM drives run hotter than drives and CPU's 10 years ago. But, that
is why today's CPU's also come with a heat sink/fan that is like 20 time
larger than the CPU so that they don't run that hot. Without that fan and
heat sink the CPU would burn up. The same is true of a hard drive. The
difference is that an internal drive is cooled by the fans in the case and
if you will notice today's cases allow for a considerably larger number of
fans than cases 10 years ago. Now Maxtor decides to cram a drive they know
runs hot and they don't both to put a fan in the very snug fitting case. All
computer devices have an specific operating temperature.

The simple fact is Maxtor screwed the pooch with their external drives by
being too damn cheap to put in a $3 fan which would have kept the thing
cool. To make matter worse the drive in my case was mounted to a metal plate
along entire bottom of the drive which trapped the heat in. This, was
another stupid design, if it was design to work as a heat sink (I don't
think that is what it was there for, I think was there to keep the drive
from becoming loose on the connectors) then it does a very crappy job.

You can buy whatever you like. But, if I am going to spend that kind of
money on an external drive and I am going to make sure that it isn't a
Maxtor brand and that it has a $3 fan in the case. Plain and simple. The
cooler you keep your computer the longer it will live and the more reliable
it will be. This is why my full tower case have 16 fans, and why I bought a
small air compressor to keep them and everything else cleaned out.

John