The fan is significantly louder than the "Silent" that it claims to be. In fact, it's decidedly loud in my opinion. Also, the design of the air ducting seems to not really allow a large amount of actual air flow around the drive. Although there is some airflow.

I have no way of measuring the runtime temperature of the drive (S.M.A.R.T. utilities only work on directly-connected IDE drives as far as I know), so I have no idea how truly effective the fan is.

Because the drive is only meant to be turned on when I'm actively backing up files, these are not issues for me. I just want it to get a little bit of cooling during the backup, then I shut it down.