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In Rogue One we know that the Deathstar plans...

...reside on a single harddrive, and it took a long time to transmit the data via the antenna at the Scarif base.

Can we determine approximately how large the Deathstar plans are (in Earth units like GB, TB)?

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    I don't see how there's any way to answer this. We don't know the giant-communications-tower-to-Rebel-ship transfer rate. Not to mention the fact that the data isn't even stored on a hard drive, it's a "data tape". And "data tapes" (plural) if you remember Admiral Motti's comments in ANH. We have no idea about the capacity or transfer speed and therefore know nothing about size.
    – TheIronCheek
    Commented Dec 19, 2016 at 16:30
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    Things like "one hard drive" and "took a long time to transmit" don't tell us much about the "size" of the plans. Data transfer rates trend at roughly the same rates as disk capacity. We also don't know how the plans are stored. Are these holograms? Are they vector models? Do they include wiring? Are sub-structures included? There really is no good way to know what kind of content to expect. The best assumption would be that the Death Star plans were likely 100 to 1000 times as "large" as "typical plans".
    – Gorchestopher H
    Commented Dec 19, 2016 at 16:32
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    ...don't forget the freehand red circle saying "Shoot Here"
    – Paulie_D
    Commented Dec 19, 2016 at 16:50
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    This is answerable (at least in part).
    – Valorum
    Commented Dec 19, 2016 at 18:08
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    @Valorum - agreed. Say it was autocad, and a large building with volume of 1,000,000 cubic metres needed 100Mb file. And say you could fit 1,728,000,000 such buildings into the death star. Then you'd need about 17.28 petabytes for the file. These are rough calculations. It depends how detailed the plans were.
    – Tim
    Commented Dec 19, 2016 at 19:21

1 Answer 1

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We can't speak to Earth-equivalent measurements, but we do know that the hard disk in question had a maximum capacity of 512 million exanodes (whatever the hell those are).

The disk apparently included not only the plans for the Death Star but also the complete design history and a log of all communications regarding the project.

enter image description here

Star Wars Rogue One: The Ultimate Visual Guide

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    It was too big to be sent as an email attachment.
    – Verdan
    Commented Dec 19, 2016 at 19:19
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    Very cool! I guess the follow-on question is: What's the conversion of exanode to Earth units? Is this unit used anywhere else in the canon universe where it might give a clue?
    – Luke
    Commented Dec 19, 2016 at 19:34
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    So, 512 yottanodes, whatever nodes are.
    – Spencer
    Commented Dec 20, 2016 at 14:32
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    @Valorum Compression should never factor into the storage statistics of a data drive. If that was the case why not just say "it has a capacity of 9e99 GB, as long as you're storing a 9e99 GB bitmap that is composed entirely of 0's... that has been zipped to 1 physical KB, then stored to the drive. Even with the best possible materials tech "mononuclear switching binary" suggests 1 BInary elemenT per molecule, which is already insane, but still falls far short of the 6.4e25. In fact, in order for the figure to be conceivable the drive would need to be able to store 100 bits per molecule.
    – Gorchestopher H
    Commented Dec 21, 2016 at 18:52
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    A "node" is probably a sector. Or 2KiB (4KiB for Flash memory).
    – pepoluan
    Commented Dec 24, 2016 at 14:56

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