I took issue with that, as I know I can copy a 1 terabyte drive in about an hour using my aging Macintosh (not the most efficient transfer). Oh, really? Really

I took issue with that, as I know I can copy a 1 terabyte drive in about an hour using my aging Macintosh (not the most efficient transfer). Oh, really? Really? 1TB is 1million MB (according to HDD manufacturers, let's not get into that debate again) so even with a relatively current and snappy drive and controller you're looking at about 100MB/s net. That's about 10000 seconds or roughly 3 hours to copy. You'll get faster speeds with SAS drives, but far from all hosting sites use them, and I doubt the author's "aging" Mac does. That's not counting the labour of documenting/tracking the origin of the drive, actually hooking it up to the target equipment, etc. The authorities could probably be handling much of this investigation a lot more delicately, but give them some credit on this side of things.