A Rather Alarming, But Not Surprising Statistic Microsoft's console breaks down approximately 23.7% of the time in the first two years of use according to warranty firm Square Trade's analysis of 16,000 failed consoles. By comparison, the Sony PlayStation 3 has a failure rate of 10 percent after two years and the Nintendo Wii fails 2.7 percent during the same period. In other words, the Wii is nine times more reliable than the Xbox 360. A separate survey of 5,000 gamers by Game Informer found that the Xbox 360 failure rate was 54.2 percent,while the PS 3 was 10.6 percent and the Wii was 6.8 percent. That survey found that 41.2 percent of owners polled had a second Xbox 360 failure after repairing the first one. In addition to this, Square Trade found that even if you ignore the RRoD statistics, the 360 fails 11.7 percent of the time due to other issues. In a statement, Microsoft said, “More than two years ago, Microsoft addressed this issue by extending the warranty to three years for consoles with three flashing red lights. More recently, we extended this coverage to include the E74 error message as well. We continuously invest resources to improve the reliability of our products, and we believe that this issue is largely behind us.” About 24 percent of Xbox 360 games consoles fail within two years | VentureBeat
There are now reports coming through that the amount of reported failure rates for 360s is dropping quite fast: Report: 360 More Reliable, Repairs Less Frequent - Xbox 360 - Kotaku. I just recently bought another Elite so I'm hoping I'll never have to suffer another RROD (original Pro about 2 years ago this Christmas).
I believe if you have the Jasper Motherboard that came out some what late last year basically got rid of the RRoD, not 100% but pretty close. They shrinked the GPU by 50% so that would stop the RRoD.