What's the price of the ST hard disk? Can we consumer grade hard disk with the same reliability nowadays?

It highly depends on how many time the drive was powered on, how many spin-ups it had, etc. The shelf life of HDD is virtually unlimited.

Thanks, makes sense. I think for SSD it's the number of writes right?

SSDs can (and do) fail before their write endurance levels.

IMHO, it's probably firmware bugs, but it's hard to tell what happened when the SSD is in a datacenter and it just disappears off the data bus. Could easily be component failure, poor assembly leading to solder failure, tin whiskers, etc.

Well, one report of a disk lasting 35 years does not show how reliable the product was. :)

Anyway, the hard part is if you want to buy something that lasts 35 years, you really have to wait 35 years to see what you should have bought, and then it's too late. It's the same problem with cars. You have to predict based on past experience and most recent observations and hope.

Makes sense. I read a few more other articles on his blog and some comments did mention a failure of the disk after a very short period of time, but likely due to a chip error not a disk failure.

Memories. Thanks for the post.