After having killed 2 secondary drives in my Sony Vaio PCV-RX6##, I decided to add a fan to cool the hard drives. Sony thoughtfully made the HDD carriage small enough that the drives sit about 6mm apart, thereby preventing any convective airflow between them. The boot drive sits close enough to the intakes on the front of the cabinet that the airflow from the power supply drawing air in keeps it relatively cool, but the inner secondary drive gets cooking hot, as 2 failed WD Caviars will attest.
I built a fan plenum from some HDPE sheet and heat formed it to shape. A Taiwan 60mm fan with an inline power adaptor sucks air through it. The shape of the plenum draws air from the space between the drives. I had to offset the plenum toward the left (door side) of the cabinet to clear the IDE ribbon sockets on the MB, but other than that, there were few space restrictions other than the power trunk from the PS to the MB. Everything runs significantly cooler now. We’ll see how cool it stays when I put in an SATA drive later…
Now I can finish up the Showcase 2007 stuff without worry.