Comment by olympus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by olympus | Hacker News Reader

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The lifespan is comparable to a cell phone (as in you'll probably break it mechanically before you burn up the CPU). If you're overclocking it and running it hard without cooling, I'd expect it to die after a year. I've never had one break from a cooling problem or any mysterious bricking that might have been cooling. Even when stress testing, they throttle back on their own, and are idiot proof as far as heat goes. The thing that will frustrate you far more is the degraded performance.

And no, if you aren't experiencing throttling, then cooling them isn't giving you any advantages. Marginally prolonging the life of a $35 computer with a $5 fan isn't cost effective- consider that when you have to buy a new one in a few years you will be able to buy more performance for the money or get the same performance for much less. Think about the upgrade from the original Pi to the Pi3, or the cost drop to the Pi zero.

Good write up. I've had half a dozen Pi's since their first release, some overclocked and some not. I've had 2 die on me from power surges during electrical storms but all the others are still going strong.

I've actually had more PC equipment fail on me (hardly surprising given their increased complexity) than Raspberry Pis, so they can be quite resilient little things.

A Samsung smartphone of mine burned up the Qualcomm CPU due to heat. A Windows Mobile PocketPC of mine burned up the Qualcomm CPU due to heat. And I never broke any of my phones mechanically.

>>as in you'll probably break it mechanically before you burn up the CPU

It's solid state, there is nothing mechanical to break. I've had two running continuously since 2014. Use a ramdisk. No issues.

I think they mean from when you toss it in a bin full of cables and scraps and something breaks off.

Correct, I meant physically breaking some part of the board as a whole, not trying to imply that there was a mechanical aspect to the CPU. I've only broken two Pis. I stepped on one because my cat knocked it on the floor, and the other I broke because I used mounting screws with too big of a head and broke off a capacitor and took the copper pads with it.

Tell that to some Nexus 5X owners, who experienced boot loops because (the leading theory says) the CPU contacts to the board were becoming broken by excessive heat while applying a system update.

Mechanical failures do happen with solid state devices, even if they are operating within their specifications. Manufacturing defects (and gaps in testing), inadequate validation of all conditions within the spec, and/or inaccurate predictions of failure rates over time can all cause this.

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