Warranty firm SquareTrade has revealed more details on its widely reported 16.4% failure rate for Xbox 360 systems. They had 171 breakdowns out of a sample size of 1040 purchased warranties, which mostly consisted of Premium 360's. Sixty percent of the failures were down to RROD, but other problems included disc read errors, video card failures, hard drive freezes, power issues, and disc tray malfunctions.

The new report does note that this only tracks up to 10 months after the warranty purchase, and once a longer period of time is given, the failure rate is likely to increase. It's also worth pointing out that since Microsoft's Red Ring of Death warranty extension was introduced last July, some users may be going directly to the parent company instead.

"Our data shows that failures spike in the third month after warranty purchase but remain fairly steady after that, with only incremental drop-off until the eight month," the SquareTrade Analytics Team wrote on the blog. "This pattern is fairly consistent with all electronics failures."

SquareTrade also said its numbers don't take into account those Xbox 360 owners who bypass it altogether and take their claims directly to Microsoft, which could mean the failure rate is even higher still.

For its study, SquareTrade tracked 27 Xbox 360 Elites, 57 Cores and 956 Premiums. Out of the 171 claims reported (60 percent), 102 were general hardware failures (Red Ring of Death). Of the other 69 claims:

- 18% were disc read errors.
- 13% were video card failures.
- 13% were hard drive freezes.
- 10% were power issues.
- 7% were disc tray malfunctions.

SquareTrade said that, because the above issues are not covered under the extended Microsoft warranty, which only covers RROD, they are the more reliable figures.