Well done! I love the honest write up and the “can do” attitude. Must have been a lot of fun too. Out of interest why do you think you made the mistake of buying 20x more drives than you needed instead of the denser storage that you mention? Was there a reason you opted for this?
I think <2x more drives than needed, not 20x (24 vs 14TB), but the racks holding the drives could've been denser. Around the same cost in any case and our colo doesn't charge for space, so it's not a big deal and we were just going with what we were familiar with, but something to try.
Oops sorry, my bad! Great to read all about it - good luck with the project.
He did mention that it would have been a higher up-front cost.