General Electric promises 500GB discs

Blu-ray facing obsolescence thanks to microholographic breakthrough

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28 April 2009 11:04 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

General Electric has revealed a "breakthrough in digital storage technology" that could mean 500GB discs will be available soon.

That kind of capacity - said to be the equivalent of 100 DVDs - makes the supposedly next-gen Blu-ray disc's 50GB capacity look positively puny.

However, at this stage, GE's breakthrough is lab-only, with no solution yet for a mass market offering and launch plans, vague as they are, for data-intensive business uses only.

The technological breakthrough comes in the field of holographic storage, or more accurately, "microholographic" storage.

This means more data can be put onto a disc, but as it's similar to the tech used on CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray, a player that could read microholographic discs would also be backwards-compatible.

GE aren't the only company working in this area. An Israeli company, Memphile, announced back in 2007 that it was a couple of years off from a single CD offering one terabyte of storage with its "TeraDisc" offering.