External hard-drive gets over-heated

[Anek]

Actually, I have an old CPU cabinet-a fanless alumninum enclosure.
And the drive in it has made few files corrupted. I don't not whether it was because of heat-buildup, or other things like dropping it, walking across the carpet holding the bare drive,.

However,I am planning to get a new and bigger drive for backups anyway.
Do you think it's safe to use the same enclosure or should I get a new one with a fan in it?

Is heating a problem?

[Hardwareman]

Since you have the old cabinet without the fan, there is no mechanism to keep the heat out of the cabinet.Because of this,your hard drive gets overheated.
This causes the platters to swell and the data cannot be read.

There are specially designed cooling equipment to keep the temperature down. These cooling equipments are capable of recovering the data from Hitachi, Fujitsu, IBM, Quantum, Western Digital, Samsung Toshiba, Seagate & Maxtor hard drives and more.

[Killen]

It is better that you take new CPU cabinet for your system.
However, new cabinets are designed with the fans fitted along with the heatsinks, so over-heating will definitely not be a problem.

Also, go for a hard-drive with a larger-size, because larger-size hard-drive will cost you comparatively cheaper.