On Mon, 13 Jan 2014 21:54:02 -0000, D.M.Chapman wrote:

In article , Uncle Peter wrote:
On Mon, 13 Jan 2014 20:33:18 -0000, D.M.Chapman wrote:

After hard drives (very frequent) and PSUs
(fairly often) I'd say RAM is probably up there with CPU fan failures.
Many of our machines run mirrored RAM so it doesn't take out the system
but it's still far from unheard of.

Hard drives I agree.
PSUs, only if they're underrated for what you're running off them. I
always get one that will never go over 50-75% load.

Can be very inefficient. Many (most?) of our servers have many small
PSUs these days and shut them down when not needed to keep the remaining
ones running at high load/efficiency.

I read something somewhere (Corsair instruction manual?) that they are LESS efficient at full load. Best efficiency is either 50% or 75%, can't remember which. Anyway, a decent PSU provides almost no heat (if you have a case where the PSU gets its own air intake, you can easily verify this), so it's way more efficient than what it's powering.

It's normally the fans that die in them tbh - small, noisy and prone to
fail. Desktop PCs with decent PSUs are less of an issue admittedly.

A decent PSU has a 120mm fan running slowly (for quietness), hence it also does not wear out. Especially if it's not running at full load so requires little cooling.

Memory, no. If it works when I buy it, it lasts forever.

It's unusual, but not unheard of. Certainly I've had more die in service
(can think of 3 in the last 12 months) than when new (can think of 1 in
20 years).

Pot luck. 4 failures is not a very big data set.

--
Illegal is a big sick bird.