Not really. There's nothing moving the hot air away from the drive, so the environment will approach equilibrium with the drive. If you had air moving over it, it would have a constant supply of cool air.
Exactly.
When I started working the drive, writing 12 GB to it, it quickly went up to a critical temperature of 122 degrees (50 degrees C) and stayed there. I set up a fan to blow across it, and in two minutes the internal temperature dropped by six degrees, eventually stabilizing at 96 degrees, a 26 degree drop. The fan-cooled drive inside the computer case which was being read from but not written to rose three degrees in temperature, from 84 degrees (F) to 87 degrees.
Ambient room temperature for all of this was 76 degrees.
Obviously if I am going to keep the temperature of the external drive down to a reasonably safe level I will have to get some sort of fan to blow across the drive when it is in use.
tanstaafl.
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