 Going completely fanless will shorten system life but once you get rid of the hard drive your concerns are definitely less.  _________________.Please put a country in your profile if you haven't already.This site is international but I'll assume you are in the US if you don't tell me otherwise.RAID levels thread http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=000000  Going completely fanless will shorten system life but once you get rid of the hard drive your concerns are definitely less.  The most common failures attributable to heat that I've seen personally have not been HDDs, but power components -- in the PSU, on the motherboard, more or less in that order. Don't know about video cards, just haven't run into them failing as much -- and when they do, I have a hard time isolating the cause.  There are usually no temp sensors to monitor in/around these power components, unfortunately. 