Yamaha CRW4416S CD: a problem with the fan?

Nathan Duran writes: I recently purchased a Yamaha CRW4416S CD burner, and while the drive itself has performed flawlessly for me, the little fan built into it broke down after a few hours of use and began making a truly horrific amount of noise. After some poking around on the newsgroups I discovered that I was not alone. I wrote to Yamaha about it and they confirmed this issue. Here is there reply, which first explains why the fan is needed at all:

The LSI's on the Circuit board must be kept cool, and we have found that there are many environments the unit will be going in and the systems can not always provide sufficient cooling. Or the unit may be "sandwiched" between devices and not allow for good airflow. The built-in fan resolves all possibilities of overheating.

We had a small number of units go out with defective fans. In many cases, just using a can of compressed air to clean out any dust collected usually resolves the issues. For those who it did not resolve, we had the units sent in for replacement.