randy, I remember testing new drives - this is in '87 - a NEW!! HUGE!! type of drive. Called Rhodime. They were 40 MB - OOOoooooh wow that was huge. DOS 3 couldn't handle more than 33 MB so we had to wait for a new version to get at the last 7 MB (in an extended partition) Every single one of those drives failed within a few months. And Rhodime vanished off the scene.... I've had a failure recently too. One out of about 60 drives I've used in the last 15 years. An IBM 120 GB that I managed to save the data off by letting it cool to room temp, then starting up and copying off it like mad for about 10 minutes until it got about 35 deg C - then switch off, wait an hour, etc... all day. So I saved the lot and got a replacement drive, it was 6 months old. That was the famous DeskStar generation of drives (aka DeathStar) a couple of years ago, the drives with the famous 'Click of Death'. And the reason that IBM gave up HDs and sold out to Hitachi. Of course there are drives with problems out there. I know that - but the main reason for failures is certainly heat. The average chassis and PSU out there (even big brand PCs!) is not really up to the job - and the reason? 1. Keep costs down and compete with price = lousy fan & PSU 2. The eternal quest for a quiet PC = Slow fan which is quiet but deadly. I bought a new PSU last year, a test winner with top marks, quiet and good they said. It was a disaster! Temp went through the roof all the time and I had to switch back to my old supersonic diesel tractor PSU - but it keeps cool! Running Poser with that new quiet PSU was impossible, on render the CPU would nearly melt down, it was scary. Of course external disks is a different thing. Then the issue is more to have the external box in a place with good ventilation and not under a pile of junk. In fact, nothing stacked on top at all. :] Fish