Right - but they had to buy those hard drives anyways, so it didn't cost them anything more than the transportation cost of the drives to buy them at the source, load them up, and then ship them.
It would be hell to get the data off before imaging the drives. What do you transfer it to? The shuffling would require a lot of technical work, which also costs money. Also, we don't know if they were on homogenous hardware by then -- they may have still been using budget pcs and refurb'd parts. So it's hard to know if your plan could work. The investment of inventing a process for mass data transfer versus using the normal process but only during a certain time period is also significantly higher.
I have to think someone ran the numbers. It's not like the folks in 2000-google were dummies.
Admittedly, it would have been a lot of drives. Back in circa 2000, according to http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte, 20 Gigabyte Drives were in vogue @$200/pop. So, a Terabyte would have been 50 drives, 10 Terabytes @500 Drives.
10s of terabytes at a minimum 1000 drives. I'm beginning to question how "simple" an operation this might have been after all....
The parameters of that scenario were that you'd ship the data on the disks that were eventually to store it (presumably without duplicating the OS on each during the transfer process). Therefore, there'd be nothing to move the data to.
The difference is that the hard drives themselves would be assets (and would probably have nostalgic value in 2013 if they wouldn't have decided to resell after the transfer)
