It's just patent offices trying to be more efficient
From an innocent/naive level, this is basically WIPO trying to do its job. So long as North Korea already has internet access, a "treasure trove" of information won't suddenly be made available to North Korea.
However,... if their internet access is limited (it seems to be - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_North_Korea) then it might be very useful. A quick search on WIPO's PATENTSCOPE database (http://www.wipo.int/patentscope/search/en/search.jsf) shows that 25 International patent applications have been filed at the North Korean patent office since 1990. I don't know how many local/"national" patent applications there are in North Korea, but I suspect very few. That doesn't exactly require 48TB of storage space, nor does it require a high speed duplex laser printer. And it doesn't exactly require full time use of the new hardware, which raises the question of potential "dual use".
Patent applications get published - tens of millions of them from patent offices all over the world here: http://worldwide.espacenet.com/ (contains all of the publications on the WIPO database and more).
So those publications are already available to anybody and everybody for free - you just need an internet connection.
Any patent application directed to "restricted" subject matter (where national security restrictions etc. apply) will not be published, and so will never make it onto the public database.
I would guess that the storage space on the server means that it either has, or is designed to have, a local copy of WIPO's public PATENTSCOPE database in order to allow staff at the patent office to search it easily, i.e. without needing an internet connection. The only searching they would have to do is presumably to determine patentability of local/national patent applications, not the International ones that WIPO handles.
So I suspect that part of the concern here might be the ease of access to the very large volume of technical data on that database (with 48TB, it might have the plain text/XML plus the TIFF/PDF images, including drawings).
So it's really the "dual use" question of:
1. what they are going to use the hardware for when it's not being used to process patent applications filed at the patent office, and
2. whether they have got a local copy of the PATENTSCOPE database, and if so what use (outside of searching for local/national patent applications) they might put it to,
and whether any of that breaks any UN bans on technology transfer.