HD Temperature
 

Was just messing around with my PC, and realized that my case had two items that weren't plugged in: one being the main case LED power (wow, my entire damn case lights up blue now in the front), and second, the main fan which is situated in front of my HD bays. Don't know how or why I missed it until now.

Maybe it's my imagination, but my computer runs even FASTER now with the main fan on. I've run a search, and there are claims that HDs operate even faster if they are cooled correctly. I know that HDs are designed to withstand pretty significant heat...so how true is this?

I doubt it. The only benefit you get to a cooler HDD is reducing the chance of heat damage to the mechanics or platters.

It's your imagination, and the stock fan will only cool them down by a couple of degrees. Still, better than nothing.

Actually some hard drives have thermal protection now and they will run at a lower revolution rate or shut themselves off completely depending on the situation if temperatures get too high. You'd have to be running this in a pretty harsh environment though for a single fan to make that kind of difference.

I'm assuming that a large portion of the protected drives are in the terabyte range?

I've got these:

Seagate Technology - Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 3Gb/s 1-TB Hard Drive

You have nothing to worry about. When Cetra means harsh, he's talking about being in the desert. Normal heat will barely degrade hard drive performance. Looking at your setup, everything should be fine.

If you desire, you can buy an fan attachment that slaps onto the bottom of a hard drive and have at it. For more information, look here: Hard Disk Drive Cooler

Yeah that drive has thermal protection, though as stated it doesn't kick in until the drive is running at a 120+ degree F environment. Normally the drive will through out a S.M.A.R.T warning too if the thermal protection is active.