Proper hard drive temperature, thats a very good question. You have to also consider, is this the reported temperature of an idle HD, or one very heavily stressed? The heat in a hard drive would be less important than the temperature of a CPU.
The harddrive consists of mostly, aluminum. The casing and the head aperture are Aluminum. There is not much in the way of electronic components, they are mostly on the outside of the case. So there is really no way to determine their temps without using a temperature probe.
CPU's run best when cooler, as would a hard drive. But since a hard drive is metal it can dissipate heat better by design than a CPU could. This is why a CPU comes with a heatsink and cooling fan. They they did not always have a fan or heatsink, and some older models only had a heatsink.
If heat build up were dire for a harddrive, then they too, would come from the factory with a heatsink mounted to them.
The only way you can control the heat on a Harddrive is by either, increasing the fans CFPS output or using a dedicated harddrive cooler. The coolers are mostly designed for SCSI hardrives, which can operate at 15,000 RPM's, and are generally found in high end servers, due to their cost.
You can add another fan into your case, either an intake or an exhaust, or both.
If you wanted, and had the space, you could mounted a fan directly near the hard drive, but since a fan can create a magnetic field, you may end up doing harm to the data, and erasing its contents.
Most desktop machines rarely drive the harddrive hard at all. Most people spend time loading an app, then sitting and working on the app for hours, with few writes and reads to the harddrive. And the Hardrive sits their idle
For a desktop user, cooling the hard drive would be nice, but for the most part, not necessary. The thing you would most like want to keep cool would be the CPU.
Setting up your APCI, APM or Power Management to spind down the hard drive when not used for 15minutes would help lower its heat build up, and is simple to do, and cheap, since it is usually available under the OS (Windows) or in the BIOS.
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All Maxtor ATA, SATA, and SCSI drives can operate with or without a fan, providing the hard disk temperature does not exceed 131°F (55°C) as measured from the top cover of the drive. Reliability will be compromised when the drive is exposed to temperatures above 55°C or 131°F. When in doubt of your system's ventilation capabilities, or ambient environment of your hard disk, add an extra cooling fan to the drive bay or system case to force air across the drive.
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