That is a pretty awesome hack, but I wonder why they didn't just use hard drives and ship it instead of wasting months. Cost / benefit seems off there.
As mentioned above around that time cost of data on hard drives was $20/gb so that would come out to around $240k at the time. It's crazy how things have changed and we can buy 16gb flash drives now for $5-10. I remember when the first flash drives came out and it was like 128mb for $20.
