I have recently started using an external 3.5 inch hard drive for video editing. When I put my hand on it, it feels kind of hot...

So I was wondering, is this thing going to succomb to heat? It's a 250 GB Samsung that I myself mounted into a CP Technologies aluminum enclosure. No holes for circulating the air... it seemed kind of odd to me, but I thought it's because it won't overheat. Well, it does!

Ervin,

I have several external USB hard drives, each from a different manufacturer. They all have vents.

If I were you, I would drill some holes in the case, on the bottom side, without the HD in it :).

Hard drives do need to stay cool, otherwise they will fail if they get really hot.

Some enclosures have dual fans in them, and are made of aluminium. So cooling should be good, especially if one fan fails (i.e. if the thing only had a single fan, a failure would be bad).

2- With your existing drive, you could potentially put it somewhere cooler (i.e. on the ground / not somewhere hot) and/or have a fan blowing on it if you feel that it isn't cool enough.