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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...

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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...

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