Hard drive cooling importance?

Disabling the fans would be an insanely bad idea. It looks like you have 40mm fans in there, replace them with quieter fans if the noise is an issue or better with larger fans if you can shoehorn them in.
 
Hard drive cooling importance among with shock avoiding are most notorius things in HDD maintenance.
Check the HDDs temps now,stop the fans and check again - if the temps increase [which is 99% sure],it's not a good idea to disable the fans. Replace them with possible largest fans you can fit in yours case,even if this require some DIY [duct,tape,pig tails :D] Small fans -fast and loud,big fans-slow and quiet ;)
 
Looking at a chart in google's HDD reliability whitepaper, the best temperatures for HDDs are the range 35 to 45C, although 25 to 50C looks okay as well. Outside of that range, the failure rate increases significantly.
 
Finally got around to addressing this issue. The hot swap bays have 4 50mm fans. I swapped them out with Gelid Silent 5 fans. $30 for a vastly quieter server. Airflow is pretty much identical.

hdfans.jpg
 
It takes very little air movement to keep hard drives functional. Natural convection will keep a drive sitting in the bottom of a case (with a standard exhaust fan) cool enough to function.

My hard dirves hang vertically from a piece of plywood with only 1/4" between them. Without a fan they stay are reasonable temps.
 
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