List of hardware failure rates

An interesting post was found at French Hardware.fr as they published a list of computer hardware failure rates, you can check it out over here. It's in French but with the help of Google's Translator it shouldn't be too hard to understand, each page gives failure rates for the most popular brands and also provides failure rates for specific components.

The data originates from a large French e-tailer, it covers returns created before October 2010 for hardware sold between October 1, 2009 and April 1, 2010. The brand failure rates are compiled using a minimum sample of 500 sales, while model failure rates are calculated using a minimum sample of 100 sales.

In the motherboard market there doesn't seem to be a lot of difference between manufacturers:

• Gigabyte 2,33% (contre 2,36%)
• MSI 2,44% (contre 2,54%)
• ASUS 2,49% (contre 3,05%)
• ASRock 2,71% (contre 2,21%)

The memory market shows quite a different story, especially OCZ dropped the ball as its failure rate increase more than doubled compared to the last report.

•  Kingston 0,30% (contre 0,37%)
• Crucial 0,93% (contre 0,78%)
• Corsair 1,41% (contre 1,66%)
• G.Skill 2,73% (contre 1,53%)
• OCZ 6,76% (contre 2,76%)

The HDD is likely one of the most critical components in your computer, in this category Maxtor received the best ranking:

• Maxtor 1,04% (contre 1,73%)
• Western Digital 1,45% (contre 0,99%)
• Seagate 2,13% (contre 2,58%)
• Samsung 2,47% (contre 1,93%)
• Hitachi 3,39% (contre 0,92%)

SSD failure rates are also listed and although you usually hear that SSDs are more durable than HDDs the numbers show a different story. Only Intel SSDs seem to score significantly better than HDDs.

• Intel 0,59%
• Corsair 2,17%
• Crucial 2,25%
• Kingston 2,39%
• OCZ 2,93%