Backblaze employee here. Yes, the 6 fans move a lot of air through the drives. We monitor every drive in every pod in our datacenter with the smartmontools (/

Backblaze employee here. Yes, the 6 fans move a lot of air through the drives. We monitor every drive in every pod in our datacenter with the smartmontools (/usr/sbin/smartctl) which includes the temperature of the drives. The drives stay well within their recommended operating temperatures as long as the fans are running. In the past, we have detected that several fans failed in one single pod when alarms went off saying some drives were running hot, so the fans are working (normally) and the air is flowing. Side note: personally I think it's really awesome that consumer grade drives come with such detailed internal monitoring for free. I also think it is disappointing that desktop consumer OS's don't monitor these things BY DEFAULT and popup dialogs explaining to you when your drive is exhibiting high temperatures or high data loss!