I know most of this stuff will be specialized server hardware

it actually won’t be, at least not for the hard drives. the prevailing strategy for quite some time now is to just use the cheapest available disks and deal with the failures on the software level. those disks will ultimately fail anyway and the increased price for some super-duper enterprise reliability server disk is not really worth it.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

That being said, wtf does “relinquishing digital files” even mean? They do know they still have the “originals” and there is no way to prove how many copies he made, right?