You may be interested in a couple of recent studies of disk drive reliability:
- by Google
http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.html
- by Carnegie Mellon University's Parallel Data Lab (whose new data center yours truly helped design
)
http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/...tml/index.html
Interestingly, neither study correlated higher operating temperatures with increased failure rates.
Ken