Ceramic Bearing fans?
 

Anyone got any experience with them?

Are they really much quieter than a normal ball-bearing fan?

And more importantly, do they really last 4x longer? I'm tired of replacing bad 40mm fans every 6 months in my hard drive bays and chipset coolers.

And can you get them in the US? the only place I can find that carries them is in Canada.

Got a link? Manufacturer name?

Many 1U servers use 40mm fans. You should DEFINITELY be able to find some with MTBF of much longer than 6 months. They may be loud, but that's what 7V is for. Try Delta; they make some pretty beefy 40mm fans.

Well.. these guys seem to be the only retailers I could find:
http://www.adpmods.com/xcart/catalog...Fan_41CFM.html

The maker is ARX:
http://www.actrx.com.tw/
(warning, flash website...)
http://www.actrx.com.tw/datasheet/4010.pdf
http://www.actrx.com.tw/datasheet/4020_2.pdf

VS. Delta
http://www.excess-solutions.com/SpecSheets/AFB4010.pdf
http://www.excess-solutions.com/Spec...elta404020.htm

Do a google search on 'ceramic bearing fan reviews' They seem to get favorable reviews, but of course a reviewer cant make any determination of the lifespan of a fan.

I've got at least a dozen 40mm fans in various machines, and almost all of them are replacements. The stupid things only last about 6-12 months. Most fail noisily, which is good, but the silent failures have killed at least one hard drive.

Interesting.

Check out the conditions for that MTBF, on the 4010: 25 deg C, and 65% RH.

If you can dig up the same info for the Deltas... (I'm bandwith impaired!)

In general, electronic component's life is reduced by a factor of 5, for every 20 deg C temp increase. This probably won't apply "straight out" here, but should give you a rough idea. The air coming out of the CPU certainly isn't 25 deg C...

You're also usually blowing cold air on the heatsink, so I wouldn't think it would be more than 5C over case temps.

I played around with the ARX fans very nice and quiet - the ceramic bearing fans I had ran less than 4000 rpm. My understanding from the manufacturer is there is a speed limitation (at least on the 60mm's I had) of around 4000 rpm above that reliability drops precipitiously.