> Your numbers are way off, as you didn't account for redundancy of the drives (any failure or bit flips of 1 of those 2,470 drives will cause corruption of likely the entire data set).
Let take another setup of same count as backup. Then another setup as back up of back up. ~150K
> This is where a huge amount of cost is.
Maintenance, humans, cooling, drive replacements cost > can't be greater than first time set up cost.
> property, building, land tax, payroll tax
Nasa runs on Government budget, I am sure they can claim some tax break there.
The point I am trying to make is, it may be cheaper to do in-house with the level of engineering talent they have.