Which part in particular of "I've solved the problem" can't you understand? I've bought 6 Maxtor SATA 250GB drives about 15 months ago and lost 3 of them within the first 3 months of operation. (2 completely, not appearing in BIOS anymore and one with a huge number of bad sectors...starting with error messages, not a sudden death) A simple fingertip temperature test was enough to tell my why. Putting the remaining 3 and the new ones (replaced by warranty) into the cooling backplanes solved my problem immediatly. All my drives, not just the Maxtors, running with a surface temp of about 30C (24/7) now and I haven't seen a single problem since.
Air conditioning is just to cool CPUs? Dream on. I was electrical technician for decades and am a computer dinosaur so I know both sides of the wall plug...and for sure a lot of server rooms and their admins. For example: The Canadian consulate in Hamburg is running a humble machine 24/7 (plus switch and the phone box) in a pretty big archieve room for their Ottawa connections. Although nothing compared to your and my machine(s) Ottawa demanded air conditioning for reliability reasons (I have to agree) I know about the details because they sent me again to connect all the stuff, including AC. Ottawa shipped the complete material with US standard power wiring, sigh. However, it was the goal to cool down the complete system, not just the lousy mid class CPU.
Oh, BTW...johnnyboy...nevermind, I never expected somebody here to see the irony of my second post (air conditioning = AC = initials of my moniker)