Over 4 petabytes 8 years ago

I'd love to have this as a torrent

you have 4,000 terabytes of storage space and bandwidth to torrent? (I'll be honest, I had to look up how many terabytes a petabyte is.)

It's actually not totally insane anymore. If you could afford a Tesla Roadster you can build yourself a 4PB storage solution. With some high density top loading storage servers (4HE for 90 HDDs), 6TB HDDs and some SSDs thrown in for caching you can build that in 36HE for less than 300k$ (not counting time needed to assemble and configure). So if that's your hobby, go ahead :D If one takes more than 5 minutes to research this I'm pretty sure that it's possible to push that number below 250k$.

Yes, university should be able to make some room so researchers can work with it. It's a lot of data, but not impossible to do with a small investment.

Oh.