Another thing you may want to look into is... keeping the HD cool.
They can generate quite a bit of heat. Heat and hard drives are a bad mix.

I use fans similar to this one .
EDIT: sorry, allenb1963, didn't see that you mentioned HD coolers.

Another thing that I like to use is
S.M.A.R.T. technology
S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology. S.M.A.R.T. technology was developed by a number of major Hard Disk Drive Manufacturers in a concerted effort to increase the reliability of drives. It is a technology that enables the PC to predict the future failure of hard disk drives. S.M.A.R.T. technology has become an industry standard for hard drive manufacturers.
Read more about it here.

It is not perfect, but helps a lot. I have noticed that most systems have this disabled in the BIOS. Also, you get get programs to log when it expects errors and the like.

Depending on your OS, utilites will vary. Most of them have a scandisk, cleanup and defrag type of utility. Also, the manufacturers of your hard drive will also have quite a few utilities to test your hard drive.

No matter how good you think your hard drive might be... MAKE SURE YOU HAVE CURRENT BACKUPS. I use separate hard drives to do this, because of speed. You can also backup to network drives or to portable media such as floppy and cdroms.

Trust me... I've had tons of data lost because of my ignorence.

Originally posted here by steve.milner

Once you have mounted the drive find the bundle of cables that comes out of the power supply and find a spare one. You are looking for a connector with 4 holes in a straidg line, D shaped and about 20mm long. Find the corresponding socket on the HDD and plug in this cable.

Plug in the spare connector in the ribbon cable into the pins on the back of the new hdd, taking care to align the pins correctly and getting the location slots and tabs together.

Plug back in the mains and turn your PC back on and with luck it should find the new drive.

If you need any more help. drop me a pm

I am not an expert, as defined by applicable law. Any modifications performed to equipment as a result of this post are entirely at your own risk.
Just wanted to add to make sure that if you are adding a second IDE device to a cable, make sure to change the jumpers to make it slave.

You can only have one master and one slave. Most devices you buy will be by default set to either cable select, or master. If you put two masters on one cable, the machine won't recognize either of them. Same with two slaves.

TechTV. has an easy to follow, easy to understand "tutorial" on installing a second hard drive. Pay close attention to the Master/Slave section.

View it here.

There is also a good site here that describes the differences between master and slave and how to choose which one. http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/id...mpering-c.html