A large set of data on long term performance of n-type HPGe detectors used in GASP, EUROBALL and CLARA γ spectrometers, as well as environmental measurements have been collected over two decades. In this paper a detailed statistical analysis of this data is given and detector long term behaviour is provided to the scientific community. We include failure, failure mode, repair frequency, repair outcome and its influence in the energy efficiency and energy resolution. A remarkable result is that the life span distribution is exponential. A detector's failure is a memory-less process, where a previous failure does not influence the upcoming one. Repaired spectrometers result in high reliability with deep implications in the management of large scale high-resolution gamma spectrometry related projects. Findings show that on average, detectors initial counting efficiency is slightly lower (∼2%) than that reported by the manufacturers and the repair process (including annealing) does not affect significantly the energy efficiency, even after a long period of use. Repaired detector energy resolution statistics show that the probability, that a repaired detector will be at least as good as it was originally, is more than 3/4. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.