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Here’s more details on the Xbox 360‘s failure rate. Because few things are as fun as kicking a man (or a video game console) when he’s down.
SquareTrade, which is an independent warranty company, says that it tracked a sample of 57 Cores, 956 Premiums and 27 Elites, or 1,040 in all. Sixty percent of the 171 that had problems (so, 60 percent of 17 percent of the total) had the red ring of death. Of the remaining hardware problems, 18 percent were disc read errors; 13 percent were video card failures; 13 percent were hard drive freezes (!); 10 percent were power issues; and 7 percent were disc tray-related.
Remember how the original model of the PlayStation would overheat after only a few hours of use? You’d think Microsoft would have constructed a more durable system.
What’s even more amazing is that these numbers only represent systems tracked for six to ten months; hardware failure usually occurs after that time frame. In other words, these numbers could be on the low side.
For the record, I’ve only had one red ring of death, so maybe I’m a little on the lucky side, all things considered.
New Info on 360 Death Rate Study [IGN via Xbox-Scene]