It took weeks to upload?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes...
Is that wrong? I see a Seagate Baracuda 3TB on Amazon at $110. Do you mean it should have included the data value or that they inflated the price or what?
It was publicly funded research data, to be processed and uploaded to the Genome Browser at UCSC. Had someone just put zero on it I think it would have gone a lot more smoothly.