A computed tomography system has a stationary part, a rotatable part mounted for rotation around an object to be examined and an interface between the stationary part and the rotatable part. The rotatable part includes an x-ray source, a sensor array for detecting x-rays passing through the object to produce projection data samples, a compressor that compresses the projection data samples and a storage device that stores the compressed samples. The storage device on the rotatable part can include one or more solid state drives. For image reconstruction, the compressed samples are retrieved from the storage device, transferred across the interface to the stationary part. A decompressor at the stationary part decompresses the received compressed samples and provides decompressed samples to the image reconstruction processor. This abstract does not limit the scope of the invention as described in the claims.