If you use them where steam and a game running are hitting the drive really hard constantly for hours, that's really not what the enclosure is desgined to handle long term. Or at least long enough so the warranty expires. So they functionally are spinning down constantly to keep heat from obliterating the component. USB hard drives are passively cooled because their 'design' is supposed to be for secondary or tertiary storage. Ive 'fixed' many external usb drives by just simply taking the dumb things out from the enclosure. Your hard drive you can generally take out and recover, but that also depends on how the controller decided to die. Usually what dies first are the USB controllers since they're not designed to be that resilient in heat situations. So functionally you have what is in effect an oven. That means you haev a spinning disk hard drive, generating heat, enclosed in a sealed metal box with no fan or even ventilation.
Also note that external hard drives like this are not designed to be used this way and their design means your drives and controllers are going to die much more quicklyįunctionally today external drives are all passively cooled and by that I mean like there is literally no cooling at all.
