Hello, I am new with external hard drive and their enclosures. I currently am running this: Seagate 160GB, 8MB Cache, 7,200RPM, inside a Rosewill RX30-U2FAB, Oxford 922 Chipset. Whenever I use this for a small period of time, 30 min or so, it gets really hot. Well, it gets hot. Is it supposed to do this? I am just afraid that the hard drive will burn up and become useless. Any info would help. Thanks

-Lotus

A drive which is working gets hot. Now, to quantize the hot… if you can touch the enclosure, it's ok, it's less than 60°C - 140°F and it's ok (the drive will actually be hotter but you're safe).

Now if you can't touch the enclosure, I can't imagine the drive, and drives are made to work at about max 80°C - 176°F, they can do their job but they will age faster and will be more prone to failure… wich unfortunately HAPPENS (ask the unfortunate owners of the first series of G5 iMacs… that's one of their problems).

So if you can fry an egg on it, stop this thing!
Else, make sure there's plenty of air around, keep dust ans sun away from it and you'll be fine

[edit, beside the mistakes corrected, I used a C for an F, which for temperatures can be very annoying lpm]

seagate have pretty good drive warranties, 5 years usually. You can go to their website and there are some diagnostic tools and a serial number checker / warranty validation. As for temperature, does the datasheet give you any oprational temperatures, again you could get this off the seagate website. Once you've checked that, run the drive on a marathon 24 hour session to prove it.