That's why I love the Sapphire dual ball bearing X-Fans. One screw to take off the fan for maintenance and cleaning and no wires to run or deal with. Replacements are $12.50 each including shipping from Sapphire and they are super easy to replace.
Yeah I stayed away from Sapphire ever since the 6950/7950 days. I changed every single fan on over 30 6950 because every one failed in 2 years and some of the ones on my 7950s I changed more than 3 times. I guess Sapphire got sick of RMAs for fans and improved their fan quality and modular design.
I have yet to have a single Twin Frozr fan fail - they must protect from dust intrusion really well.
6 out of the 10 sapphires Ive had have failed me. I will never buy a sapphire again. This is not even fan related. I RMAd one but it came back to me unable to mine.
The VRMs on those 280X Dual-X were also crap. There are at least 10 posts here of people who had their card burn or entire rigs catch on fire because of bad VRMs. You combine bad fans plus cheap VRM cooling and you have high failure rate. That cards did mine well when they weren't busy dying.