On point 2, you can build a 100 TB "NAS" with an 8 drive chassis and 8 of the new 20 TB drives. Pricing should be under 5 or 6k USD unless you go crazy on the s

On point 2, you can build a 100 TB "NAS" with an 8 drive chassis and 8 of the new 20 TB drives. Pricing should be under 5 or 6k USD unless you go crazy on the server. That should give enough extra to allow for a good bit of RAID parity and filesystem overhead etc. I think it's less about storage quantity now, and more about the available bandwidth for access to that storage, if we assume 100 TB is reasonable for a whole university. If we assume parallel reads from all 8 drives at, say, 200 MB/s (which is likely optimistic and assumes one single linear workload), this will only get you 12 Gbps. Throw multiple users and a need to seek, and rapidly the cost seems to be to become random access, latency and bandwidth (SSD caching in a tiered architecture etc). This might help Google justify higher pricing for storage than the "raw" storage cost, if the market will bear it. Alternatively, maybe the solution is for Google to badge up a non Google Drive storage service in the education workspace suite for research data, based on more appropriate cloud storage offerings with glacier type tiers etc? Offer universities unlimited storage and people will find incredible things to store there you never dreamed of....