<snip>
the heatsink itself - a chunk of metal, doesn't normally fail. Not to
my knowledge anyway!
Why exactly don't you want to replace the "whole unit"/HSF?
Replacing the HSF is standard procedure.
Personally, i'd probably buy a new one than even go through the hassle
of oiling the thing! Infact i'd probably have bought a second one
initially anyway as a spare. And MAYBE oil the broken one - for fun.
Oiling a fan takes about 2 minutes. Over half that time is
unscrewing it and then mounting it again, or finding the
best oil available on-premises if you don't know what or
where it is.
Oiling sleeve bearing fans is a common practice as it has
been for over half a century. Any sleeve bearing fan should
be relubed for longest life with rare exceptions being
permanently sealed types, which are to be avoided unless
exceptionally high quality to the extent you could expect
them to last longer than the viable life of the equipment
they're used in.
A properly relubed fan can subsequently last longer than it
did during the period from brand new until first lubed. The
important distinction is whether it is relubed soon enough,
rather than left running until the bearing is deformed too
much, it will go out of round at which point a minor fan hub
imbalance can become excessive in operation, and the
additional motion can pump out lubricant at an excessive
rate unless it is an unusual fan with a large lubricant
reservoir.
I'm not trying to talk anyone out of replacing a fan though,
if it is replaced with a high quality fan that is ultimately
the best solution... but until that happens it seems the
system in question here needed to stay running, so the more
immediate factor is weighing the trivial amount of time it
takes to put a drop of heavy oil in it, versus the change
the fan will stop working entirely and the part will
overheat.
It's quite common for a failing fan to keep running until
the system is turned off, allowed to cool then turned on
again- at which point the fan is seized and more trouble to
relube, and easier to overlook since it is then quiet.
Hopefully if this situation occurs the system has an
overheat shutdown protection if not an additional fan RPM
signal and actively monitoring sense software or bios.
What do you do when your hard drive or motherboard dies? get out a
soldering iron? More power to you if you can do it. But how long does
it take? 10 hours ? 2 weeks? a month of sundays?
Depends on the problem, I get failed equipment all the time
and when it is reasonable to fix with a soldering iron, it
gets put on a stack of "to do" projects and the needed parts
added to a list for the next order from an electronics
house. Emphasis being on time spent per item, not on how
soon after failed that it's repaired. Something like failed
motherboard caps might take 1 hour total, if discounting the
time taken to pull the board out of a case (since the case
would be reused anyway, usually, repaired or not the board
was going to be pulled) and to retest it (since any new
board, instead of the repaired board, would also be tested
to confirm stable operation before deployed).
Obviously it's not the solution for a single user, single
computer scenario... couldn't be time or cost effective to
plan like that, but to safeguard against such failures and
have a system back up in shortest period of time, one would
have to have replacement parts on hand already which gets
expensive too, prohibitively so if the system can remain
offline for long enough to get a part rapidly shipped from a
seller known to get orders processed quickly.
