I heartily second Vertech1’s advice to use a WD Red drive for the EX2 over a Green drive. The Green drives are not meant for 24x7 NAS usage. I too have never shut down my EX2 in the 7 months I have owned it (right from EX2’s product launch). The green drives though shouldn’t fail in just a couple days use - those drives were probably faulty to begin with. But if you plan on leaving your NAS on 24x7 and on having a worry-free NAS drives that won’t fail 6-12 months into the usage, I strongly urge you to get Red drives for the EX2. Yes, with red drives you’ll pay an extra few bucks but the long term reliability will be worth it…unless you are willing to take the chance of a premature abrupt drive failure. You will probably get a replacement green drive if it is still under warranty - but the disruption and potential loss of data is just not worth the headache.
As for the fan, yes there is a fan in the EX2. You can see it in this pic included in Aandtech’s review of EX2 → http://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/3435#9
And you can learn more about the EX2 fan’s usage that the user Twins answered, that this link takes you directly to → http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-My-Cloud-EX2/Question-regarding-the-FAN-used-by-WD-My-Cloud-EX2/m-p/802561#M1442
