It’s not surprising that Microsoft’s XBox 360 has turned out to be the least reliable of all the gaming consoles sold. It was only 18 months ago that we exposed a massive failure rate with hundreds of users reporting a “red ring of death” problem.

Now a new research study has revealed that Xbox 360 consoles fail at a rate of 23.7% during their first two years of use, compared with a failure rate of 10% for Sony’s over priced  PlayStation 3 and just 2.7% for Nintendo’s Wii, according to a survey of 16,000 failed consoles conducted by warranty provider Square Trade.

The report did note that, after Microsoft redesigned the Xbox 360 with its “Jasper” chipset in late 2008, reports of the “Red Ring of Death” signaling a console failure have begun to abate.

The company ponied up $1.5 billion to address warranties for failed Xbox 360 consoles.

Square Trade noted that the most common types of problems seen with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 were disc read errors and output issues.

VentureBeat cited another survey of 5,000 consoles, conducted by Game Informer magazine, which found the Xbox 360 failure rate was 54.2%, compared to 10.6% for the PlayStation 3 and 6.8% for the Wii.

That survey also found that 41.2% of Xbox 360 owners would go on to experience a second failure of their repaired consoles.