I never understood why so many devices were using such poor quality and noisy fans. They fail earlier, they move less air and they're noisier. Now I understand there's a cost issue, but it's not only that: a lot of it is also just poor design / poor research / poor parts sourcing.

For the little story, back in the early beige PC days (think 386 and 486), quiet PC fans didn't exist. It was all super noisy, and typically at a fixed speed.

And, coming from the Commodore 64 and then Commodore Amiga that were silent machines, this was driving me crazy.

So 18 y/o me managed to source some proper fans out of Japan (Panaflo fans IIRC) and I went bug my neighbor, who was studying to become a chip engineer...

I came to my neighbor with an idea: "Why not lower the fan speed when the PC ain't too warm and then only speed it up when the PC gets too warm, you know, like a car's fan adapts to temperature?" (cars would do that: they'd start spinning a huge fan to cool down the water in the car's radiator, but only once the water would be too warm).

And so my neighbor drew a little electronical circuit and we bought "thermistors": I would "calibrate" them with boiling water in my mom's kitchen and then we'd install the circuit with the thermistor in the PC's PSU, with Panaflo fans.

So basically: back in the 386 and then 486 days, I already had quiet PCs. I'd "muffle" my HDD in an enclosure, opened on top (so that heat could dissipate, on which I'd put a 7V panaflo fan [I'd take the 12V and the 5V and create 7V]).

Once the PC world began to wake up and the likes of Be Quiet! and Noctua became a real thing, I was delighted. My current main rig has a Be Quiet! PSU and a Noctua fan for the CPU. I cannot thank such companies enough.

P.S: for what it's worth my neighbor later on moved to southern California and became an early Broadcom employee and he's been much more successful than me for he was the real smart cookie. We're still friends to this day.

Noctua Fan Swap on a Calnex Rb/GPS Frequency Reference