That magentic ring fan from a long time ago?

i can't remember what it was called or who made it but i can describe it:

had a silver/metal outer ring, the center was very tiny and it was driven by 4 magnets on the outside of the fan. i guess they pushed some magnets in the ring of the fan. But i do know it only came in like 70mm versions.

i was just wondering why this fan never took off....? i had one and it was wisper quiet while pushing a lot of air and having virtually no deadzone.

I think they're called Maglev fans.

The only one's I've seen cost around 20 dollars or more. It makes it hard to purchase when it's just going in the case somewhere, specially when you can get an aerocool quadro which pushes nearly 40CFM and isn't too terribly loud for 5 dollars on newegg.

they are called TMD (tip magnetic drive) fans and are made by Y.S. tech. the reason they never took off... they where 45$ and only produced by Y.S. Tech, so im assuming they had a patent. no competition, no reason to drop the price, they did work well, but other than the cool factor, there was really no reason to use them over a standard case fan at 1/4 the price.

They were no where near $45. I bought a TMD fan on a Tt TR2 M2 HSF, for $12. It died a noisy death about 2 months after I got it. That's the reason they didn't take off - they had huge failure rates, and were only moderately more quiet than regular fans.

The reason I didn't use mine was that the mass of the fan created some very strong vibrations.
The main point of the design was to eliminate the deadzone but heatsink design changed to take this into account (side mounting, heatpipes, etc.) so there wasn't any real benefit left.

Verax fans were also kinda interesting at that time, with a huge deadzone due to a turbine like fan shape for higher pressure and reducing noise.