I've noticed that one of my hard drives is  running a little hot. in fact hotter than the cpu on occasions.

   

the offending hdd is a Maxtor SATA STM3320820AS it runs a fair bit hotter than the other two hdd i have going in there. i have a 40gb ide western digital caviar (not sure which model but fairly recent) for my page file and a 160gb ide maxtor (again not sure which model but fairly recent) for backups and whatever.

   

this is my setup. sorry for the criminally bad photo. my camera sucks donkey at macro. the blue box at the top is the inverter for my cold cathodes, beneath that is the 40gb caviar, below that is the SATA maxtor (the hot one) and below that is the 160gb maxtor. what you can't see is the 12cm fan blowing air from the front through the gaps between the hdds.

now i would have thought that this would mean the middle hdd would be the coolest because it has airflow over both sides, but it seems to be the opposite. this hdd is only about 2 months old and it cost me a fir bit so i don't expect it to have any faults this early on, but you never know... I'm not particularly worried about anything because i have backups and i kept the recipt and packaging for the hdd. i just want to know what's going on because it seems a bit strange.

yours must be just as fudged as mine

hdd do tend to run hot if you are running heavy programs off them for long. Its nothing to worry about. You indicated temp seem pretty normal to me...

I don't use SATA so I can't comment on their functions...