Bearing in mind the timeline of the trek universe, the Trek starship memory capacity's are a very real possibility when you consider the following spec's...

Exponential expansion.
8" floppy held 360kb of data
An SD card (SDUC) will hold up to 128TB of data

The point is how much of a capacity increase AND physical size decrease there has been in a few short years, (22 years in real time).
Current SD type cards at 128TB (2021)
Star trek "The Next Generation" (2364-2370) series with the Enterprise D.
Enterprise D was able to contain it's own full operating systems AND all the data from the Binars planet when it had a solar flare.

mrfxit - 2021-04-29 09:26:00

Jeez am SD card can hold 128TB now?

nice_lady - 2021-04-29 09:46:00

I bought a 125 GB SD card for $25 the other day, but bigger ones were available at a higher cost.

tygertung - 2021-04-29 09:50:00

nice_lady wrote:

Jeez am SD card can hold 128TB now?

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=SD+ca
rd+capacity
YEPp but going to need pretty deep pockets & some fancy readers.

mrfxit - 2021-04-29 09:51:00

SDUC isn't commercially available yet and I think the largest SD cards you can currently buy top out at 1TB

vtecintegra - 2021-04-29 09:58:00

To damn easy to lose. Been there done that. Fortunately not with terrabytes of info tho????

nice_lady - 2021-04-29 10:06:00

Don't forgot data transmission speeds as well . How much data is transmitted when using the transporter?

(open up a debate that the person at the other end is not the same as the original but a copy)

logo - 2021-04-29 10:20:00

But what happens to the original?

tygertung - 2021-04-29 11:05:00

mrfxit wrote:

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=SD+ca
rd+capacity
YEPp but going to need pretty deep pockets & some fancy readers.

Nothing there says that there are 128tb SD cards. SDUC Standard can address up to 128 tb. But means that the file table can address that much data, doesn't mean anything exists with that capacity.

It's about the same as saying that the street I live on has 1 million houses because the sign can fit up to 1000000 bob street. But there is only 3 properties.

ira78 - 2021-04-30 15:19:00

Er yes, but looking at the real world...look at the first Apollo launches, they did it all on tiny space and tight code. Now, the space is bigger and the code has expanded to fill it...bloat. Convoluted spaghetti.

lythande1 - 2021-05-01 08:48:00

lythande1 wrote:

Er yes, but looking at the real world...look at the first Apollo launches, they did it all on tiny space and tight code. Now, the space is bigger and the code has expanded to fill it...bloat. Convoluted spaghetti.

Agreed my first computer only had 16k of memory. It still effects how I code or what it was called then programming lol

sirrab - 2021-05-01 16:56:00

ira78 wrote:

Nothing there says that there are 128tb SD cards. SDUC Standard can address up to 128 tb. But means that the file table can address that much data, doesn't mean anything exists with that capacity.

It's about the same as saying that the street I live on has 1 million houses because the sign can fit up to 1000000 bob street. But there is only 3 properties.

your missing the point.
The smallest SD card I have seen is 32mb & were sold in year 2000.
Largest capacity sd card currently available on a regular basis is 512GB (2021)
So thats a leap from 32MB to 512GB in 21 years just in currently & commonly available SD card tech.
Theres a multitude of different types & capacitys of memory storage & SD cards are only one (& a pretty tiny device at that, for that amount of storage)

mrfxit - 2021-05-01 21:30:00

nice_lady wrote:

Jeez am SD card can hold 128TB now?

Not yet but the tech is nearly there & the protocols have been decided already.

I think a good part of the reason theres only 512GB cards currently available would be the hardware needed for bigger cards & the market price for sale

mrfxit - 2021-05-01 21:33:00

I just checked my local supplier.

Micro SDCards max out at 512GB for now but 1TB would be possible and a pile of those would offer a lot of data in a small space.

If you move to a bigger form factor, you can buy small SSD drives in the 8GB range. Would be fun upgrade for my laptop if I had money to burn. But classic 'spinning rust' HDD still win with 18TB drives available off-the-shelf locally.

I always thought Star Trek got future computing tech largely right compared with other sci fi series. Computer power was buried away in a data centre somewhere in the ship, with a mix of terminals and mobile devices connected.

gblack - 2021-05-02 08:44:00