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Comment by flowerlad | Hacker News Reader

Fans break in a couple of years, so for my home Network Attached Storage I chose Raspberry Pi over a PC because Raspberry Pi is cheap and does not need a fan. I use the Flirc case (mentioned at the bottom of the page) to dissipate any heat the Pi does generate. It seems to work well. I run Samba, MySQL, Docker, Jenkins and so on just fine on my 8GB Pi 4, without needing a fan.

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> Fans break in a couple of years

Am I just incredibly lucky or hopelessly unlucky? I have never had a computer (desktop or laptop) last long to have a fan fail. Is fan failure really that common? In just two years?

I get why people hate fans. I have a hand me down switch behind my desktop computer and the fans on that thing is louder than the fans on all three of the computer towers that it powers. However, the switch is not made for desktop use and in a 1U chassis, something has to give if we want airflow. However given that space is not an issue, you can get the classic noctua fan and cooler like the NH-D15 and a full ATX case if you're building new and that the fans will probably last over ten years with no servicing.

I get that this is probably tremendously overkill but just thinking out loud...

It probably depends quite a bit on environment. I have multiple pets (2 dogs and 5 cats). Not only does dust build up but hair (dander?) Does as well. Things that also affect it might be whether you open windows a lot or use an internal forced air system with a filter.

And of course, how often you end up cleaning the fan and surrounds because of this. I bought a new case for my desktop system about 6 months ago. There has been visible dust buildup around the case inflow fan for a couple months now, and I should probably clean the outside and vacuum out the inside of the case.

I wonder if I’m lucky as well, I’ve had I think 1 fan failure in 25 years of computing.

My desktop has 3 80mm fans that are 18 years old and work fine. My switch is 4 years old, my server NUC is 5 years old, my laptop was about that same age, gaming pc has 10 year old fans - all no fan failures!

I wonder if it’s environment dependent; I imagine if you live in a dusty or sandy place it could decrease lifetime...

I think it also depends on whether the fans are ball bearing or sleeve bearing.

At higher temps, you get about 2x life out of ball bearing fans. I’m not sure what their cutoff is for “dead”.

Interesting to see that position doesn’t matter for ball bearings, but vertical is best for sleeve bearings.

Would be interesting to see if a 10yr old fan still spins at the same rpm or has same current draw.

https://www.newark.com/pdfs/techarticles/mro/ballVsSleeve.pd...

I have half a dozen Pi4s running in heat sink cases (various brands), as HTPCs streaming from a NAS, Octoprint server, Home Assistant server, and various heavier load purposes. Since the earlier firmware updates I’ve never had any overheating issues at all, even after sustained heavy loads.

Outside over-clocking or extreme edge-case stuff I think the “Pi’s NEED a fan” stuff is mostly leftover from the early days pre-update and just stuck around.

Also use FLIRC cases for my k8s cluster. They feel hot but I've to remind myself the whole case is a heatsink. So far it's been keeping the temperature at 47C most of the time (room temperature is in the mid twenties).

>Fans break in a couple of years

Having a Nespi+ case and can say that the Fan sounds louder than than a printing laserjet you can even hear the bearing rumbling (combined runtime maybe 2-4 weeks), small cheap fans live much less than 2 years.

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