I would recommend using a hard drive-cooling fan with all hard drives. I have cooling fans for both my IDE and SCSI drives. In the lab, we have cooling fans on the drives at all times. As much as a pain in the butt this may be for some, optimizing your drive has several benefits. Besides optimizing the files, this process also catches many minor problems that may manifest themselves into a major problem later.
Examples are cross-linked files, or orphans.
Another good reason is that if you do have a problem accessing data on your drive, when a utility is run, such as Norton, Nuts and Bolts , Tiramisu , etc the chances of recovery are much higher if the drive has been optimized recently. TIP it is also and excellent tool for Zip disks . I want to mention that it is not too difficult to tax a power supply in some systems if they are fully loaded. If possible, I would recommend making sure that the systems have a decent power supply. They are much more reasonable than in the past.