French Website Publishes HDD, SSD and Motherboard RMA Statistics

A French website has just published the results of a recent RMA (return merchandise authorization) study which covers some of the most important computer hardware components on the market, including hard drives, SSDs, motherboards, graphics cards and PSUs, to determine their reliability.

The study includes products sold from April to October of 2010 by a large French retailer specialized in online shopping.

Only brands that have sold more than 500 units were included in the study and each individual product model has to retail in more than 100 samples.

The first products to be covered were HDDs, where Western Digital proved to be the market leader with a RMA rate of only 1.5%, while Hitachi drives had the worst reliability of the bunch as its RMA rate is set at 3.1%.

Moving forward to SSDs, we get to witness a rather strange behavior, as only two of the brands covered by the study manage to provide better reliability than WD's hard drives.

These brands are Kingston and Intel (1.2% and 0.3%, respectively), while all the other don't manage to do better in this regard than their platter-based counterparts.

The worst result is achieved by OCZ that, with a 3.5% return rate, it even manages to surpass Hitachi'S HDDs.

Fortunately, in the motherboard space, things are a lot more quiet as all the major players in the industry record similar results, with Gigabyte and Asus leading the race.

As far as the graphics card market is concerned, manufacturers seem to be split into two main groups.

At one end we have GPU makers, such as XFX, MSI and Gigabyte, that have high return rates, and, at the other end, we find pretty much all the other brands, with PNY, Asus and Zotac leading the race.

 

The last graph in the study focuses on power supplies and reveals that the lowest return rates were held by the Antec and Cooler Master units, while Thermaltake and Fortron PSUs are some of the most unreliable in the industry.

More figures, including statistics for individual models and product families are available in the original article published here. (via Sweclockers).