The bottleneck wasn't accessing the data once it had been archived, but archiving it in the first place.

Both source and capture bandwidth are finite resources. Several people with considerable infrastructure (a friend in Finland working at a major network provider is among the archivists) were supporting the effort. The limit is how quickly they can peel data off the source.

A few station wagons (or SUVs) full of SATA or Blu-RAY drives might be even more useful.