Computer Memory

[Chancellor M'rek]

When the EMH Transferred Denara Pel’s brain into the holo buffer, Kes asked him if there was a enough disk space. He said that his program alone was 50 million gigaquads, much larger than the humanoid brain. However when Sisko and his Command crew were stored in the holo buffer and loaded into the James Bond Holoprogram Eddington had to wipe everything in DS9’s computer to make room. Why did Voyager have so much larger of a computer than an entire space station?

 

[Kor]

Because the Cardassian tech was bare-bones and utilitarian purely for military purposes, not needing all the immense storage space that would come in handy for the exploration and scientific stuff that Starfleet is involved in.

Kor

 

[Timo]

Since we never got any gigaquad references in "Our Man Bashir", we can't really tell how the storing of six neural patterns from a transporter signal in a computer compares to the storing of a single live brain's synaptic patterns in a holobuffer. Perhaps the former is simply the more demanding job, there being a lot of fluff in a transporter signal?

But "Our Man Bashir" is weird to begin with. Odo claims that "this is more complicated than just an ordinary transporter pattern". No, it isn't - they are dealing with an ordinary transporter pattern, very specifically.

Yet if they only preserve the "neural signatures" (which may or may not be the same thing as "synaptic patterns") and ditch the transporter pattern for the bodies, how do they eventually restore the six heroes into their bodies? Did they just approximate some body patterns for them somehow? Surely the pattern for O'Brien's left pinky hangnail is just as intricate as that for his synapses - both are just clusters of atoms, after all. And if they can create the hangnail out of whole cloth, why not the neural signatures?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Angry Fanboy]

The question answers itself really doesn't it?

State of the art Federation starship versus thirty year old Cardassian mining facility.

It's like asking why a floppy disk from 1990 holds less data than a 2020 memory stick.

Also in addition to being three decades more advanced (and likely built by the technologically superior culture) Voyager's entire raison d'être is collecting data, wheras Terok Nor was built as an ore processing orbital waystation.

 

[tomswift2002]

I remember in one of the books (it might’ve been the “Double Helix” book that dealt with Tom Riker and the Maquis) it was said that Starfleet ships needed to be virtual libraries so that if a ship was out of contact with Starfleet, or communication was spotty, the crews could call up any information they needed without requiring the ship to be connected to the Federation’s subspace network. Whereas a ship like the Maquis raiders or Cardassian ships were designed more to be like a filing cabinet with the necessary info (I.e. instruction manuals) but not much else. Hence Starfleet ships had giant computer cores, but everything else had something smaller.