This is at home, and it's summer, so that means hot temperatures, and there is no A/C cooling in the house, either. Hard drive is Maxtor 7200RPM type, and from its SMART readings, it's constantly around 55^C, which seems way too hot. The other time it went to 62^C and I had to shut off the computer and then weird things started happening with the drive, like it disappearing from Windows and I had to reboot. 55^C is when it's just sitting there doing nothing. I can feel the heat being radiated if I bring my hand close but not touching. Can you recommend a product that can cool the drive? Thanks.

describe your case cooling configuration & where your hard drive is located in the case

Yeah, a little airflow over that thing will reduce hdd temps 10°C or more Skip

My computer is really old and bad. How do fans connect these days? Is it with those 4-pin connectors (Molex?)? Because right now my case is cramped - there is like zero space. There are 3 5.25 bays; top two are taken up by CD drives, third bay is this removeable hard drive contraption. This is where I placed the hard drive; it's in a small cramped box and placed inside the holder to make the connections in the back. Then there are 3 3.5 bays; top one is the floppy drive, bottom one is another hard drive, and the middle one is empty, because I did not want to place two hard drives so close together. So there is like no fans except the CPU's fan and the PSU's fan. I could get rid of the swappable thing, since it's pretty much useless now, but I don't have the equipment to mount the drive inside the 5.25 bay.

Case fans come in a couple of different types. Some connect direct to motherboard like your Heatsink fan. If you have available fan connector on the board. Others are have a Y connector to go inline with your HDD/CDROM power connectors. It is up to you how you go about arranging some extra airflow around the harddrives. Add one casefan to the rear of your box blowing out. Add one at the front if there's room drawing in. Attach one any way you can using zipties or whatever blowing directly on the drivebays. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for life.

The brackets to mount a hard drive in a 5.25" bay are very inexpensive. There are hard drive cooling units available. They are fairly slim and attach to the top of the drive. Check www.cyberguys.com for the above, or any computer parts shop.

So which type of cooling do you recommend? Both more case fans and a hard drive cooler? Look how old that thing is >> 800 mHZ, it'll be gone in two or three years (I have to endure the fact that I can't play top notch games right now), but hopefully case fans are interchangable. If so, can you recommend some brand names for fans? I can stand some noise, but not hurricane-like noise, eg noise equivalent to a CD drive spinning.