system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why does the Curiosity Rover have such a poor computer/limited data storage?
gpt
There's a few reasons for limitations on the computing technology that goes into space.

For starters, various things need to be custom built. A store bought hdd won't work in a vacuum (or when weightless) for a few reasons, and you wouldn't trust something off a best buy shelf to survive the possibly bumpy ride and landing. SSDs, like all solid-state transistor technology that goes into space, has to be radiation-hardened, to prevent components from being destroyed (or states flipped) from particle or cosmic ray strikes. This problem is exacerbated with higher density devices, as it becomes more likely something will get hit when the spacing is closer.

And then there's more pragmatic concerns. Power consumption is a big one. The whole rover runs on not much more than a few hundred watts. People have desktops with bigger power demands then the entire rover. So is simplicity. When you make a $2.5 billion dollar space faring robot your harddrive **can. not. break.** You don't want anything more complicated than it absolutely has to be.

So you're not going to go with the newest piece of tech, you're going to go with something that's tried and tested. And you'll want to run your own tests on the entire system well before you launch it. So it certainly won't be state of the art by home consumer standards as of now, when it finally arrives.