this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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When I was a kid, Commander Data from Star Trek TNG was the height of technological possibility. TNG was set in the 2300s.
It looks like hard drives are selling for about 20 bucks a terabyte now. Commander Data had a storage capacity of 100 petabytes.
So today, to buy hard drives equivalent to the capacity Commander Data would cost about $2 million. You would have to be very wealthy to afford that as an individual, but the cost will only get lower. It will still be quite awhile before a random laptop will have a Commander Data's worth of storage space. But you're talking decades, not centuries.
Though, this calculation is for the Data that appeared in the original TNG run. His more recent appearance in Star Trek Picard may be different, as his specifications there may canonically differ.
This calculation was only meant to detail the capacity of the original Commander Data, not the more recent Big Data.
For what it’s worth, the capacity of Commander data did very a little bit during the show, but I just chalked that up to a few upgrades.
Besides, I think it’s important to mention that data was not built for storage capacity. He only had as much storage capacity as he realistically would need during his lifetime. Until he could get an upgrade, I suppose.