HTPC hard drive temp high

My mate has been having problems with his Acer Aspire L100 HTPC and when I tried testing the hdd the program stopped fairly quickly and informed me that the hdd was overheating. When I tested it with Speedfan it said that the temp is 60C.... CDs always come out of the machine fairly hot, and USB sticks get hot as well. 60C seems hot to me for a hard drive, I seem to recall that they should be between 20 and 40C, but I have no experience of HTPCs.... I imagine they will run hotter than desktops, but are these temps safe? It's still under warranty, so no problem to get it fixed..... thanks for any hep.

60C is too hot. 50C is ok, 55C for some disks. Ideally you'd want to be around the 30-40C mark. Your friend could drill some holes in the base of his case around where the HDD is, and hopefully back-pressure should pull some cool air from underneath to cool it.

He's only had it a few months though, so either it's a design flaw, or some cooling part has died, I'll just get him to send it back. Thanks