optical diskEven before settling with the concept of 500GB external hard drives (very few people own them till today), an optical disc that can store 500 gigabytes (GB) of data, equivalent to 100 DVDs, has been unveiled by General Electric. Its a micro-holographic disc which is of the same size of a DVD but holds 100 times more than a normal DVD. Even Blu Ray Disks (which are mainly used to save company information or High definition movies) have capacity of 25GB to 50GB. This technological breakthrough can very well bring in a revolutionary change in the disc storage which have long been confined to CDs and DVDs without noticing a significant development.

As bbc.co.uk suggests

The challenge for this area of technology has been to increase the reflectivity of the holograms that are stored on the discs so that players can be used to both read and write to the discs.

Brian Lawrence, who leads GE's Holographic Storage said on the GE Research blog: "Very recently, the team at GE has made dramatic improvements in the materials enabling significant increases in the amount of light that can be reflected by the holograms."

The storage depends upon the reflectivity of the disc. Better the reflectivity, more the capacity.

But the problem is about hardware. Though GE thinks that it will instantly catch up to the market, the interest of hardware vendors will matter to the progress. Again the cost of the disks and the player itself will have to be minimal so that people can instantly get a taste of it.

However, 500 GB of optical disk will allure a lot of prospective buyers I feel. It will be very useful if you can have a whole enterprise set up information into one disk or the full collection of HD movies in one single disk! GE, we are looking forward to it.