posted
Well, the idea of the DF holding 60Tq is a bit much, but VOY's jump to giga- and teraquads from TNG's kiloquads isn't entirely bad. Bear in mind that the E-D had simple isolinear chips, while Voyager has bio-neural circuitry.
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posted
And we've seen what ten years of advancement in data storage can do in the real world.
On the other hand, there really hasn't been a great leap in computer technology, at least not visibly. On the gripping hand, once computers pass a certain point, will we even notice their improvement anymore?
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posted
Thats true about performance but the problem is only about the increasing size of computer storage but the way that data is stored. With such a large computer core in voyager a good database management system is needed just to store and keep track of the information. Imagine the Operating System that voyager would be using to run its hardware. Hopefully, it is not windows based.
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posted
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posted
Janeway: "Mr. Tuvok, fire photon torpedoes"
Tuvok: "I'm trying captain, but the torpedo systems have performed an illegal operation."
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posted
If a quad was a quadrillion bits, that would put one around 110 terrabytes. That's over 80 million floppy diskettes. Over one million zip disks. Over 6,000 DVDs. Or 46 of those nifty new credit-card sized devices that'll be coming out in a few years. So with our best data storage, 60 TQ would need the space taken up by 3 quadrillion credit cards. That's 1.7 ex 13 cubic meters. That's enough to make a cube 26 kilometers on a side. I'm estimating that's enough to cover the land surface of the earth with a layer four inches deep.
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posted
Well, bear in mind that a bit is pretty standard, since it's a binary digit. A byte, however, was decided to be eight bits so as to accomodate a sufficient number of characters (256) while not taking up too much memory (we could've had ten-bit bytes or twelve-bit bytes, or whetever, but they would take up extra space, and the extra characters it would provide aren't really necessary).
Now, if Trek uses larger "bytes" (if they use more bits to store a single character), then they would need more storage space to hold things. Say they use sixteen-bit characters. What would be a simple 50k file for us, would actually take up twice as much space on a Trek computer. So, to put it another way, however much bigger a Tek character is than our bytes, they need that many times more space to hold it. If they use sixteen-bit characters, a DVD would only hold half what we can fit on it. The information would be twice as detailed, but there wouldn't be as much of it. If their "bytes" are even larger, this is even more evident.
So one can see why such large storage capacities could be necessary.
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posted
Theory: 1 quad = 1 quadrillion bits (or bytes, doesn't make much of a difference)
1 Teraquad would be 10^15*10^12=10^27 bits. Asssuming that it were possible to use single-atom storage devices, then a silicon device (density: 10^21 cm^-3) would require a volume of 10^6 cm^3 = 1 cubic meter. Not a convenient size for a tricorder.
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