Thanks for all the feedback. Its much appreciated.

Well I have managed to get a temperature probe and have placed it on the
hottest section of the drive.
This happens to be the bottom left section of the drive if looking at the
drive with the component side
facing you and the IDE and power connecters pointing towards the bottom (or
floor).

After leaving it for a while on my netBSD 1.5.1 system the SMART reports:

id value thresh crit collect reliability
 1 200  51 yes online positive (Raw read error rate)
 3 129  21 yes online positive (Spin-up time)
  Raw data: 4066
 4 100  40 no online positive (Start/stop count)
 5 200 140 yes online positive (Reallocated sector count)
 7 200  51 yes online positive (Seek error rate)
 9  98   0 no online positive (Power-on hours count)
  Raw data: 1524 hours
10 100  51 yes online positive (Spin retry count)
11 100  51 yes online positive (Calibration retry count)
12 100   0 no online positive (Device power cycle count)
194 112   0 no online positive (Temperature)
  Raw data: 38 C
196 200   0 no online positive (Reallocated event count)
197 200   0 no online positive (Current pending sector)
198 200   0 no online positive (Offline uncorrectable)
199 200   0 no online positive (Ultra DMA CRC error count)
200 200  51 yes offline positive (Multi-zone error rate)

The interesting thing here is the SMART has indicated a drive temperature of
38 C
but when I look at my temperature probe the temperature reported is 50 C.
Obviously the SMART temperature sensor is probably located on a cooler
section of the drive (hopefully the most critical portion).
I then placed the drive on a windows machine with the same temperature
sensor
positioned at the same point. In this case the temperature sensor reports a
fairly
cool 32C and the drive feels cooler to the touch (obviously). I did not
retrieve
smart info while on the windows system. Both the windows and BSD boxes
have the same motherboard and processors (Intel Celeron 1.2Ghz). So they
have the same IDE controller hardware. I thought that the motherboard could
be a problem so placed the 250G drive on a netBSD 1.6 box I have which
has a different motherboard and processor. On this system the temperature
sensor reports a temperature of 46 C. Now it is also useful to note that the
drive is mounted on the top of the systems in the open with both top and
bottom
open to the air (its in a bracket). There is no fan cooling it but I think
that being in
the open should be fine. The room temperature is about 25-26C.

Does anyone experience the same problems with these large drives?
Or am I the only one? Again any comments would be really useful.

Thanks
Ian