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I paid $20 for a Hyper TX3 and I have my Phenom II X3 720 oc'd from 2.8 to 3.4, which wouldn't run reliably on the stock cooler. I don't know if that was a sale price or what but I am quite happy. I have a bunch of fans in my system but I can still hear the CPU fan when I am using the CPU, not so much otherwise. Maybe the additional $15 was spent making it quieter :)

when they could be talking about important things, like which CoolerMaster case will get you the most chicks.

I can only speak of Dell laptops since that is what I am familiar with....

My 2.5 year old Latitude D600 would be so hot that if I didnt put a pillow barrier between it and my legs, it would feel like a very bad sunburn. But as I often forgot, the pillow would slide and cover the the ONE fan slot on the bottom. Keep in mind, this laptop only became this hot when playing games. The plastics under the video controller felt like they could melt.

Now that I have a new Inspiron 6400, its like going from hell to heaven. They obviously made improvements on cooling with the additional airflow slots on the top, back and many more (3 I think), on the bottom. I think the newer video card doesnt get as hot anyway. No need for that stupid pillow barrier...and just when I was about to break down and buy one of these: aluminum widescreen notebook cooler.

My Samsung 300GB Drives (in Redundant raid mode) hit 70C at some times (like a simple NTFS defrag)... hot enough to cook an egg. So can these 500GB drives make toast if I slide some bread in the 3.5" bay between them?

At 70C, your drive lifespan is probably going to be measured in weeks...

I'd peg it at a desireable temp is anything under 45C. And anything over 50C will likely kill the hard drive within a matter of weeks or months. Even if you take a drive that was running at 50C for a few weeks and cool it back down to 40C in a new environment, it's still very likely to fail in the short-term. As always, some drives are more susceptible to heat failure then others.

It doesn't take much to cool drives (fortunately). A small amount of airflow across the drive is enough to pull the hot air away from the unit and replace it with cooler air from outside the case.

My personal preference for difficult-to-cool systems are bay coolers where you take up 2 or 3 5.25" bays and install a kit with an 80mm (2 bay) or 120mm (3 bay) fan and put 2-4 hard drives into the unit. The 80mm units work well as a 2-drive cooler because you get a large air channel between the two drives and the fan moves quite a bit of air over the drives. Putting the full 3 drives into the 2-bay cooler results in insta-cooked drives if the fan stops (but with only 2 drives in the cooler, you have some leeway). Bay coolers do make it harder to swap drives after a failure, but most failures I've seen are heat-induced so it's a wash.

Ideally, HD temp should be roughly 5-10C above ambient (30-35C in a 25C room).

Alternately, you can use a good quality case with dedicated fans blowing over the hard drive mounting points. Or simply use a larger case which spreads the components farther apart (so that your CPU isn't heating up your GFX card which is then heating up your hard drives).

For Linux... Software RAID. Use any controller that you want, you can even mix/match them to fill available slots. No worries about drivers, compatibility, or having to buy (3) RAID controllers to protect against failure. (One for a hot-spare, the 2nd in an off-site location... both on the off-chance that you can't buy an exact replacement three years from now when the RAID controller dies.)

My current "monster" box is an (8) drive Antec p160 running Gentoo (AMD64, 4GB RAM, 2 300GB RAID1 arrays, 1 200GB JBOD scratch drive, 1 600GB RAID5 array). Four drives below and 4 drives above (taking up 3 5.25" bays using this 4:3 bay cooler). Or I could've ditched the optical drive and used a pair of 3:2 bay coolers to pack (6) drives into the 5.25" bay area. I run PostgreSQL, Apache, SubVersion, rsync backups, Samba, DNS and DHCP services on this box. The RAID5 array is basically a big backup drive for my network (and yes I wish it was larger).

My next home server will probably be based on the Antec p180b case, which I can cram 10 or 12 drives into. Based on the schematics, airflow looks better then the old p160 case. I may even upgrade the existing p160 server to a p180b case.

Antec p160, p180 or p180b. The p160 has an excellent side-panel that flips on/off and has two large easy-to-use rotating thingies that hold it in place on the upper edge. (The thumbscrews along the back edge are optional, the built-in turny-thingies... where's my thesaurus?... hold the panel in place just fine.)

The hard drives down below are tray-mounted, easily removed on the p160 (I have yet to get my hands on the p180 case).

But if you're really concerned about hard-drive cooling, put your hard drives in the 5.25" bays using a 3:2 or 4:3 bay cooler.

My home office also gets up to 85F during the summer months (no insulation in the walls). So I am very conservative when it comes to cooling. I've used the 3:2 unit for many years (1998-ish?) and have never lost a drive due to heat failure. (OTOH, I've killed a few drives that weren't in a cooler block like that.)

It doesn't take much airflow to cool a drive.

I'd suggest (if you have spare 5.25" bays) looking at either:

3:2 bay cooler - allows you to put up to (3) 3.5" drives into a 80mm fan unit that fits into a pair of 5.25" bays

4:3 bay cooler - same idea, takes up (3) bays, holds up to (4) drives, and uses a 120mm fan.

Both of these do a very good job of keeping hot drives cool. Plus, the larger fans are quieter then the tiny 40mm fans. (I've been using the smaller 3:2 product for 8-9 years now and it's never failed. I've seen 5-10C temp changes by using them.)