[K12OSN] Fans - quiet vs. failure?

[Chuck Kollars]

Does anybody have a couple years experience with fanless clients?

There's a clear advantage in the much lower noise level.

But I suspect the other side of the tradeoff is a very high cost in increased failure rate. 

I'm old enough to remember when demotivated users caused hardware failures simply by putting a piece of paper over vent holes - I suspect students would accidentally cover vent holes frequently. The last time I stacked up a bunch of Ethernet hubs, all but the bottom one failed within three weeks. And shortly after I rotated a DSL modem so the vent holes were on the sides instead of top and bottom, it failed. 

Am I just worrying about something that's no longer a problem, or are high failure rates and susceptibility to misuse still big issues?

-Chuck Kollars